


all the things left unsaid

by apocalyvse, keep_swinging, rainstorm97



Category: Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background humans, Brainwashing, Canon Compliant, Family, Gen, Hunters, Hurt/Comfort, Promise, THE LONG AWAITED, Torture, Werewolves, background wolves - Freeform, but only by us, it's a good one guys, technically, torture fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24604750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalyvse/pseuds/apocalyvse, https://archiveofourown.org/users/keep_swinging/pseuds/keep_swinging, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainstorm97/pseuds/rainstorm97
Summary: One minute, they’re on the side of the road, eyeing skittles and m&ms for the pups back at the den, waiting anxiously for their return, and the next, they’re in cages, separated by silver and nasty men with wicked smiles and cruel weapons.Wyatt loses himself, Willa loses everything she’s ever known, and one wrong move could cost them everything.When there’s no moon, it’s easy to lose yourself in the woods.
Relationships: Willa Lykensen & Wyatt Lykensen
Comments: 37
Kudos: 40





	1. that should have never been your road (we should have stayed there on the corner)

**Author's Note:**

> hi hi, it's your friendly neighbourhood roo, back here with the bois to destroy your evenings with a little angst. aren't you excited???????
> 
> this fic is co-written by myself and keeps, and edited slash moderated slash sighed over while she adds more plot by rain. to see more of us, you can visit us on tumblr - roo lives at [zombiedadjokes](zombiedadjokes.tumblr.com), keeps lurks as [keepswingin](keepswingin.tumblr.com), and rain curates over at [rainfallingfromthesky](rainfallingfromthesky.tumblr.com). we're super friendly, we swear, and we (well I would, anyway) would love to talk about the plot here, or the playlist, or the headcanons, or whatever you've got in mind.
> 
> anyway. enjoy!

They don’t have time to run. 

One second they’re staring at a stretch of highway that seems to lead to nowhere, Willa rolling her eyes when Wyatt says he wants to see the gas station and snag a couple of snacks to surprise the pups with, and the next they’re surrounded by men far quieter than any ordinary humans. 

She’s on the ground before she can react, a heavy boot pressing into her back, pinning her there. Pain arcs through her spine, and she can’t even take a breath before Wyatt is slammed into the ground too, right in front of her. 

Her gut tells her something’s wrong when the first thing the group of men does is something they shouldn’t. 

A younger hunter, with blue eyes and a blonde beard, crouches in front of Wyatt and rips his moonstone from his neck, smiling wickedly before returning to his full height and passing the necklace off to someone beside him. Willa tries to move her head to see the others, to turn or tilt it, but the man jabs the steel toe of his shoe into the space between her shoulder blades, and she winces and turns back to her brother.

Wyatt’s eyes are panicked, locked to hers. She holds her gaze steady, trying her best to remind him that they’re okay, they’ll be all right. She wants to tell him they’re going to fight - because they always fight, right to the end - but there’s some muttering from above them and in the next second, he’s gone from her sight. Her stomach twists, and she almost calls for him, but swallows the words before they can erupt from her mouth. _Show no fear, show no fear, show no—_

“Up,” a voice behind her snaps, and then she’s hoisted to her feet and turned towards the group surrounding them. 

Her stomach drops.

There are six of them, some with pistols strapped to their hips, others with rifles on their backs. Around their necks, they all wear a necklace, a silver arrowhead that hangs from a thin chain, signifying that they are hunters (in another world, it could be compared to the moonstone necklace of a wolf, but not in this world, not to her). 

She doesn’t know which group or faction they come from, or why they are hunting werewolves out here on a quiet stretch of highway. What she _does_ know is that they’re already towing Wyatt towards a white van parked on the side of the highway, the door wide open and waiting and two other men waiting inside. 

She knows she could howl, knows that Wilder or Wylie could be there in less than five minutes - but five minutes is too long and her duty is to protect her pack, not bring them to their deaths. Instead, she stays silent and keeps her eye on Wyatt as the three remaining men look her up and down, whispering to each other under their breath. The man behind her holds her arms far too tightly, the muzzle of his gun shoving uncomfortably in between her ribs, but she doesn’t protest or panic or squirm in his grip.

She waits for the two in front of her to turn and mutter something to each other, and then she moves. She pushes backward suddenly, with enough force for the man to fall, tumbling over the guardrail separating the forest from the highway, and then she goes for the other two, her claws raised. To her right, she can hear Wyatt doing the same, ripping free of the hunter’s grip on her cue and jumping into the fight as she knocks one man down and attacks the other, aiming for his face. 

She’s able to rake her claws across his cheek, a growl ripping from her throat, and then Wyatt’s shouting wildly, drawing her attention his way. They have him on the ground again, helpless without his moonstone; strong but not strong _enough_ as hands shove and silver pistols press against his skin. 

She goes to open her mouth and call for him but before she can, there’s a sharp prick in her shoulder. 

She whips around, and sees the other man she had tackled taking a few steps back, his face wavering in her waning vision. The man she’s on top of shoves her off him, and she falls to the ground, her limbs feeling like rubber, her hands shaking. 

Wyatt yells for her, yells for her until she can’t hear him anymore, and that’s when everything fades into darkness. 

## X

She wakes with a gasp that echoes in the space around her, her head pounding and her limbs heavy even as she scrambles to her feet and blinking the drowsiness she still feels out of her eyes. 

She finds herself in a place that is not the forest that she usually runs through, nor the den she calls home. The room she’s in is cold and damp with a stench that reminds her of a dead animal left to rot in the summer heat of the forest and no bigger than the main room of the den. The floor she’s standing on is packed dirt, and metal bars stand all around her, trapping her in a cage where she has barely enough room to move. A set of chains are hooked to thick cuffs over both her wrists, enough give for her to stand and sit and shuffle around the cage, but not to do much else. The chains are hooked onto the bars of the cage behind her, pressed against one of the concrete walls that enclose the rest of the room.

She’s in the far left corner, the last cage in a row of five. Across from her is another row, with five more cages, and then a walkway in the middle big enough for two people to stand side by side. Most of the cages are empty, except for the three directly across from her. The wolves inside are without their moonstones, just like her, sleeping fitfully where they’re curled up in the corners of their cages. 

She tries to inch closer to the front of her cage to see them better, but finds she can’t, the chains stopping her before she can even reach halfway. She gives them a few good tugs, testing their strength, weighing her chances, but before she can do much, she hears cheering and hollering echoing from somewhere outside the room, making the hair on the back of her neck stand up. 

She listens, and tries to calm her heartbeat as she thinks of Wyatt, as she thinks of how he’s not in this room with her, as she hopes he’s in a cage somewhere else, somewhere she can get to him - and then she hears what sounds like a growl echo from the open doorway. 

She watches through the bars, unable to see, but able to hear. She might not have her werewolf-hearing without her moonstone, but she still knows the sounds of a fight between wolves. Her stomach churns when she thinks she hears a victory a few moments later, over faster than it had started. There’s more cheering, and then everything lulls to an eerie silence once again.

Willa doesn’t take a seat but she does take a step back to stand in the middle of the cage, exhaling shakily. 

What the hell _was_ this place? 

She reaches up a hand to clutch at her moonstone, a habit she’d gained over the years, twirling and tugging and tracing the stone whenever her mind was working a mile a minute, but she already knows it’s gone, can already feel the last of the power that usually rumbled quietly under her skin wasting itself trying to heal minor bruises and aches. She’s strong without it, stronger than any other wolf in her pack no matter what, but it scares her none-the-less; it terrifies her, deep down, if she thinks about it hard enough - to be without the very thing that gave her power. Without the very thing that could be her only chance out of this place, given the opportunity. 

Bringing herself back from things she can’t prevent, or fix, she takes in her surroundings again. The bars caging her are silver, she doesn’t have to be able to smell them to see the swirl entwined in the metal, though the chains clamped down on either of her wrists are not. She could scoff at that fact, but she doesn’t; better not to tempt fate. The ceiling is low, and the few hanging lights are dim, lighting the room in a yellowish glow that reminds her of the lamp Wyatt had once found on one of his human explorations.

_I don't need a night light_ , she had told him after he had excitedly shown it to her later that night. _I'm a wolf_. 

The lamp had been a simple thing, small and square, with a black handle to hold it from the top and tiny shapes going down all four sides of it, black silhouettes that turned yellow as soon as the switch on the bottom was turned on. Wyatt had looked at her like she was crazy, and then he had smirked. 

_Are you sure?_ he had asked her, teasing, and before she could respond he had directed his attention back to the lamp. _It’s for Wanda,_ he’d told her, playing with the switch, flicking the lamp on and off. _I just thought she’d like it._

_Wanda doesn’t need a night light either, Wyatt. She’s seven._

He’d ignored her, passing the light over to his left hand before tucking that hand behind his back. _It doesn’t matter how old she is,_ he’d said, his eyes meeting hers before he had turned in the direction of the pack’s chambers. 

_Everyone’s scared of something._

There’s a loud bang from Willa’s right, and then another, and another. She flinches at first, not expecting such a loud noise, and then turns her head and finds a man standing outside her cage, a bar of metal raised in his hand and a devious smile splitting the lines of his face.

She straightens, and pays no mind to the chill that runs down her spine. She doesn’t like the look of this man, doesn’t like his smile, or his eyes, or the metal rod he taps against the bars of her cage, like he’s threatening something worse. 

“Well, well, _well!_ ” the man says, his voice loud. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the other wolves push themselves away, towards the wall farthest from the man, ducking their heads and whimpering softly. Her stomach twists. There’s something not right about a werewolf, about her kind, who she is, cowering - _submitting_ \- to a human. It doesn’t sit right with her, none of it does; from the man’s smiling face, to the wolves sitting caged around her, to the stained walls that hold her in. 

This isn’t a place for wolves. This isn’t a den, isn’t a forest, isn’t a pack. This a place of no return, a place of horrors that she can’t even begin to decipher...and she and her brother had been thrown in with the rest. 

“Welcome to the doghouse,” the man says with mirth, his voice loud in the stillness of the room. He’s an older human, with wrinkles creasing his face, one eye glass and the other grey. He has a white goatee, short and unkempt, and he’s wearing all black, from his leather jacket to his pants. “We’ve never caught an Alpha before,” he says, his eyes flickering to the proud marking on her cheek. “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

“Who are you?” she asks, interrupting his monologue, and she shows her fangs and takes a step toward the bars caging her in. “What is this place?” The man doesn’t react when she moves closer - _far too confident in the silver bars_ , she thinks; his first mistake. She advances further, the chains wrapped around her wrists the only things holding her back. 

The smile slowly fades from the man’s face, replaced by something dark and ill-tempered. She goes to say something else, to taunt or tease him, knowing an easy target when she sees one, but he slams the metal pipe against the cage again, and the rattling of the bars is enough to momentarily silence her. He reaches into the cage, and she goes to step backwards out of his reach; but he is faster, his sweaty hand wrapping around her shoulder. 

His fingernails bite into her skin, stinging, and he grips her shoulder tight enough that it _hurts_ , but she doesn’t back down. “All of you fucking mutts think you’re so smart—” he snarls.

Willa doesn’t let him finish. The chains dig into the skin of her wrists, ripping them open raw, as she uses all of her weight to throw his hand into the bars, and when she hears him cry out, shocked and in pain, she can’t help but smirk.

“Fucking bitch!” he roars, the other wolves in the room flinching back at his tone, and the pipe clatters to the floor. She keeps her weight on his hand, trapping it there, angled so that the bars aren’t near her skin, and she’s so focused on avoiding the silver and holding the man’s hand there that she doesn’t even see his other weapon until it’s too late. 

The feeling of fire ripples up her shoulder, her skin blistering and burning, and she gasps, flinching away on instinct. The fire follows her as she retreats toward the back of her cage ( _not_ _yielding_ , she tells herself firmly, _never yielding_ ), and when she looks up she’s staring down the silver barrel of a gun. 

Her heart stops as she watches his finger curl around the trigger.

He fires and Willa expects everything she’s ever known to fade away, for her to bleed out right there, her brother lost to this place, her body another number in a pile. But then the man speaks...and she’s still breathing, her heart is still pounding.

“Feisty, aren’t we?” the man sneers, lowering the magnum. Willa looks to her right and sees the bullet, sees where it has entered and stuck to the cement of the wall, where it has buried itself in the chipping plaster and not her skin. It’s barely a relief, to see it stuck there instead of inside her; the man is still here, the gun is still in his hand, and she knows now, without a doubt, that this place is not safe.

“That’s enough of that now, mutt,” he says, his eyes full of hatred, and tucks the magnum back into the waistband of his jeans. He bends down and picks the pipe up, before glancing down at his hand, discolored and swollen. “Goddamn. Guess this is why we’ve never bagged an Alpha before, huh?” 

He meets her eyes then, smirking, taunting, enjoying every minute of this. Willa feels her blood boil, feels the anger bubbling and the despair screaming. She doesn’t belong here, Wyatt doesn’t belong here. _None_ of these wolves belong here, playthings for a man who saw this all as one twisted game. 

“My name is Monroe,” he tells her, the pipe spinning casually between his fingers. “If you try anything like that again, then we’re going to have more than one problem.” He lifts the pipe in a threat and it takes all of Willa’s self control not to roll her eyes. If he wanted to beat her with the pipe, he’d have to come in and get her. Smacking it against the bars was nothing but a cowardly man’s threat. 

In her opinion, Monroe was a coward in more ways than one.

“Where’s the wolf I was with?” she asks, spitting the words at the bars between them.

Something like vague recognition washes across Monroe’s face at the mention of Wyatt. “What, the Beta?” he finally answers, and just hearing Wyatt’s title spat with such animosity and disgust reminds her that this is not a place in which they wish to stay. “He’ll be put to work with all the others. A Beta isn’t anything special - not like you, _Alpha_ …”

He trails off, and Willa’s heart twists and twists and twists at the words he had spoken, _he’ll be put to work_ bouncing around her head over and over again. What did it mean? Was he going to be shipped off? Forced to work? Something worse?

She stops the thoughts before her mind can unravel all the stories, all the ways humans have found ‘uses’ for werewolves. She doesn’t want to think of her brother like that, beaten or dead or sent so far away she could never hope to find him.

The confusion, the concern, must show on her face because Monroe laughs at her, loud and taunting and with a smile that shows all his shining white teeth.

“You’ll learn soon enough that everyone has a purpose here,” he continues, when he’s satisfied with his threats. “This is a business, after all.”

“What _purpose_ are these wolves serving?” she asks, not afraid even as his eyes flare. “What do you want with us?”

“You don’t need to worry about the others,” he tells her, glancing over his shoulder at the wolves in the other cages. “You only need to worry about yourself.”

“ _Why?”_

He grins, and taps his fingers gently against the bars. “Because _you_ , Alpha, are going to tell me where your pack is. Wolves are getting harder to find, and money’s a little...tight right now, you see.” He smiles. It’s all teeth. “A whole pack would get us through these tough times just nicely.” There’s a knowing look in his eyes that she doesn’t like. She bites her tongue and glares at him.

“So then,” he says, pulling the magnum from his waistband and checking the chamber. “Let’s talk about your pack.” 

## X

Wyatt sits in a cage for several days before they come for him.

He can’t tell how much time passes. There’s no windows in this strange, cold den full of hunters, no clocks or noticeable routine to mark the time. He can’t see anything but the room full of cages he is in, and the wolves huddled against the ground around him; dead or just sleeping, he doesn’t know.

Mostly, he tries not to look at them, instead watching the silver in the metal bars glimmering under the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. He feels like he can smell the horrid stuff even without his moonstone, feels like he can taste the sting of its scent on his tongue and feel it burning at his skin even though he hasn’t touched it.

There’s chips in the bars too, around the silver, tiny holes and larger claw marks, and he can’t help but wonder how many wolves have tried to escape, and how many have failed or died trying. He wonders if any had succeeded with their minds intact, or if it was just an endless game of cat and mouse, of hide and seek. 

_But I don’t like hide and seek, Wyatt,_ seven-year-old Wanda had whined once, for the umpteenth time on that bright summer’s day, even as he had lifted her by the scruff of her jacket and carried her, kicking and grumbling, outside to where Willa was already waiting for them.

_But I don’t care,_ he had told her with a knowing smile before dropping her on the closest slab of rock, his youngest sister crossing her arms and frowning, the spitting image of her older sister. 

_Do you know why wolves play hide and seek?_ Willa had ventured, dropping from a rock nearby to stand next to Wyatt. Wanda had looked between them, to Wyatt for an answer he wouldn’t give, to Willa for a hint she didn’t provide. 

_Why do we play hide and seek? I hate it._

_This is how you learn to hunt, pup._ Willa had glanced over at her brother then, and he’d nodded his head, urging her to continue. _It teaches you how to hide, where you won’t be caught. And if something bad happens—_

Wanda had looked at both of her siblings like they were crazy then, like Willa was saying the most absurd thing she had ever heard. _But we’re wolves. Why would we need to hide?_

_There are still things out there that can hunt and hurt us,_ Willa had told her, before Wyatt could stop her. _The pack won’t always be around to protect you._

_Willa_ , Wyatt had said, appalled, but too late.

_Why wouldn’t the pack be here?_ Wanda had asked them, her eyes shifting between her siblings. _Why wouldn’t you guys be there?_

The twins had shared a look, and Wyatt had stepped back and forced Willa to answer, to fix the problem that she had created. _It’s nothing for you to worry about_ , she’d said and smiled, before pulling the pup into a hug, wrapping her arms around her tight. _We’d never leave you_.

_Do you promise?_ Wanda had asked, her voice muffled by Willa’s shirt. Wyatt remembers smiling, remembers watching his sisters and joining in on the hug. 

_I promise we'll be here as long as you need us._

“Welcome to your new home,” a voice says, and he looks up into the face of a man with one fake eye and a smile that shows too many teeth.

“Name’s Monroe,” he continues, when he sees he has Wyatt’s attention. “I’m the owner of this whole joint. I come down to tell you the rules once, and you never forget.” He laughs. Wyatt’s eyes flick between the silver key he twists in his hands, glittering and deadly, and his face, untrustworthy at best. 

“Rule number one, if you try to escape, you will be shot.” He lifts up the corner of his shirt to show the fifty-seven magnum haphazardly tucked in his waistband. “Don’t misjudge whose carrying and who’s not either. That’ll cost you your life.” 

He sighs, the silver key going back and forth, back and forth as he passes it between his hands. “Please don’t make me shoot you. Every dog shot is money down the drain, and I’m trying to run a business here, you know?” He says it casually, like a request between friends rather than a threat. Wyatt doesn’t respond, busy watching his every move. 

“Rule number two, you will do as we say. No exceptions.” Something dark passes through his eyes as he says the words, and Wyatt almost wants to shuffle back into the corner, to get as far away from this man as possible. _Don’t show fear,_ Willa snaps in his mind, and he stands his ground instead. 

“Finally, rule number three, you will fight, even if you don’t think you will.” His lips slip into a smirk as he takes a step back from Wyatt’s cell, silver key still clutched in between his fingers. “Now if you ask nicely, I’ll let you out to play.”

“Where’s—” 

“Your Alpha?” Monroe finishes for him. Wyatt feels his heart squeeze painfully at Willa’s title, a title gained far too young, and kept far too ruthlessly. “She’s serving her purpose. Just like you, _Beta—_ ” He laughs, a cruel, twisted sound that bounces off the walls, “ _—_ are going to serve yours.” 

He whistles, and someone pops their head in from the doorway. “Where’s this one’s shirt? He needs it back, he’s going into the ring.” 

The man in the doorway disappears from sight. Wyatt barely has time to feel fearful about Monroe’s words because in the next second he’s unlocking the door to his cage. He stands in the doorway, smiling. 

There’s something off about Monroe’s smile, something that doesn’t sit right with Wyatt whenever he sees it. A shiver runs down his spine and Monroe chuckles to himself, swinging the key around and around on one finger. “Don’t forget the rules,” he reminds him, and Wyatt gets the feeling something bad is about to happen. 

The man from the hall returns with Wyatt’s purple shirt in his hand, the material still stained with dirt and grass marks. Monroe takes it from him and hands the other man the key, gesturing towards Wyatt. “Get those off of him.” 

Wyatt keeps his eyes on Monroe as the other man enters his cage and unhooks the cuffs weighing down his wrists, freeing him, before stepping back out just as quickly. He seems almost fearful of Wyatt, jittery in his actions, and he wonders if he’s new to this, just like he is. Monroe throws the shirt at him. 

“Put it on, mutt. You’ll need it.” 

“Why?” he asks, keeping his voice neutral. 

Monroe’s lip twitches, annoyance spreading across his face. “Rule number two, mutt,” he answers, and then he whistles again, two short sounds that make the other wolves in the room flinch and recoil, pulling themselves into tighter balls, huddling as close to the wall as they can get. Wyatt doesn’t like it. “Do as you’re told,” he threatens, tapping the front bars with his finger. “Serve your purpose.” 

He smirks and takes his leave as two new men enter. One he has seen in days prior; Dave is his name, tall with dark hair and dumb enough that the other men seem to always be shouting at him. The other one is short and stocky, with black hair and a crooked smile that has met a fist one too many times. The jittery man in front of his cage is still standing there as the others advance, grabbing pipes from where they hang on the wall. 

“Put your shirt on, or go without,” the stocky man orders, his face flush with impatience. 

Wyatt does as he’s told, slipping his shirt over his head. As soon as it’s on, two of the men grab him by the arms and throw him from the cage, letting him crash to the floor on his knees. “Get up,” Dave grumbles, like Wyatt had chosen to fall rather than being thrown. 

Someone else grabs him by the arm and yanks him to his feet, so fast that he stumbles and nearly falls again. Their grip stays as Dave leads the way, expecting him to follow. Wyatt hesitates for a moment, and then is jabbed in the middle of his back when he doesn’t immediately move, unsure of whether to fight or follow.

“Move it, mutt,” one of them seethes from behind him, digging the pipe deeper, and Wyatt wills his feet to move. He shuffles out of the room, into a dark hallway where he can’t see anything. Faint lights hang above him, casting enough light to see the way by, but not enough light for him to peer into the rooms that he passes, every one silent and dark.

They walk and walk, until suddenly with a shove, he is turned to the left, into a short tunnel and a shaft of bright light that falls from somewhere far beyond the gate at the other end. A hand on his shoulder jerks him to a halt just short of the gateway, its grip so tight the nails almost draw blood, digging through his shirt to the soft skin below. Another hand presses something into his palm, something hard and round and warm with a fire that soaks into his skin, and reaches all the way down to his bones.

_A moonstone_ , he knows without looking; not _his_ moonstone, one with considerably less power than his would currently hold, but a stone nonetheless, a source of the power of which he has so long been deprived.

“In you go,” someone grunts behind him, and then a pair of strong hands propel him through the gate. The gate slams shut behind him, rattling on its hinges. He glances back at the men that stand there, watching him with hungry eyes from between bars of pure silver.

A roar rises above him, so loud it makes his ears ache, and he whips back around, his gaze turning upwards. He finds himself staring into bright fluorescent lights and the faces of a hundred or more hunters, a jeering crowd that shove and jostle their way past each other, leaning over the top of the wall to stare at him with curious eyes and wide grins. 

_What is this?_ he wonders, and stares at the circle of humans just as they stare back, at the circular cage of concrete walls and packed dirt floor he has found himself in. A loud creak echoes from the other side of the ring, another silver gate opening, and then a wolf tumbles into the dirt, a moonstone clutched in his fist. He scrambles upright, eyes wide and frightened, and hurries to put the necklace on, like someone might take it from him if he doesn’t.

Feeling the warmth of his own stone in his hand, Wyatt does the same, settling it warm and heavy around his neck.

There’s a loud banging, the sound of metal hitting metal, from the gate behind the other wolf and the man jumps, skittering away from the noise and closer to Wyatt. His eyes are scared but his body is tense, like he might attack; Wyatt eyes him uncertainly and circles to the right, keeping his distance, his eyes flicking up to the crowd every now and then as he tries to figure out what is going on.

“You’re new here,” the other wolf says, hunched like he’s about to jump towards Wyatt, his moonstone shining bright as his eyes flash yellow. 

“What’s going on?” Wyatt asks, his eyes focused back on the ground, on the wolf and the walls and the dust that rises as their feet scuff at the earth. “What do they want?”

The other man tilts back his head and laughs; the noise quickly devolves into a cough, reaching into his chest and ripping at his lungs. “They want us to fight,” he croaks, rubbing at his throat with one hand. “That’s what they do here. They hunt down wolves, and then they watch us kill each other.”

Wyatt pauses, surprise colouring his face. “Why would anyone _—_ ” He’s interrupted by a shout from above, a glass bottle that sails past the other man’s head and shatters on the floor behind him. The wolf flinches and steps closer; too close for Wyatt’s liking, but his back is almost against the wall and the crowd is leering above him, and he can’t quite understand why a wolf would fight another wolf on the commands of a couple of humans.

“Don’t have much choice, pup,” the man tells him, and something hard and painful flashes through his eyes. “You’ll learn soon enough.”

“I won’t fight you,” Wyatt says, eyeing the wolf carefully, his eyes darting between the moonstone resting against his chest and his hands, squeezing and twitching. His eyes flash again, amber, but the color’s dim and faint. It doesn’t take a fool to realize that this wolf is on his last legs, a step away from collapsing and never standing again. 

Wyatt’s heart clenches painfully. 

He won’t fight. He won’t attack. He won’t give these monsters something to watch, something to cheer and laugh at. “What’re you waiting for pup?” the man growls, draws his lips back so that Wyatt can see his teeth, yellow, chipped and bloody. 

Wyatt takes a step back ( _stand tall_ , his father tells him with a nudge to his shoulder, the two of them standing before the entire pack, Willa a few steps ahead of them with his mother. _Betas stand tall, Wyatt_ ) and the wolf follows him, closing in. 

“We can get out of this,” Wyatt tells him, lowering his voice, his eyes scanning the crowd. He finds Monroe standing closest to the railing of all, clutching it so tightly his knuckles turn white. The wolf laughs, but it holds no malice, only exhaustion and desperation. 

“No,” he mutters, so quiet that Wyatt has to strain to hear him. “No one gets out of here.” He closes the space between them, his claws reaching for Wyatt’s throat.

Wyatt’s not much of a fighter. He’s a good hunter, he’s good at tracking, and he has the patience to wait for the perfect strike, has a knack for knowing what his prey are going to do. Fighting face-to-face though, fighting _other wolves_ , is far from his strong suit. He’s the peacemaker of the pack, not the fighter - that’s _Willa_ , not him. That’s why he’s Beta, why _she’s_ Alpha.

Even so, it’s almost laughably easy to duck under the older wolf’s grip, to leap out of his reach and then do it again when he turns and gives chase, throwing himself across the ring. He lands in the dirt at Wyatt’s feet; for the flash of a second, for a terrified beat of his heart, Wyatt’s instincts tell him to kick the man away, to bury his boot in the wolf’s stomach - but he doesn’t. That isn’t who he is, isn’t what he wants to be, no matter what this older man insists.

“ _Kill him!”_ the crowd roars above him, a hundred voices all shouting together, and Wyatt stumbles backwards, horrified - at himself, at the humans, at the way the other man rises to his feet and comes after him again and again and again, impossible to beat down no matter how many times he hits the dirt.

Trash rains down from above - bottles and beer cans, scraps of food and rocks the size of his fist, thudding into the dirt around them. A rock throws the other wolf sideways, narrowly missing his scalp, and a bottle shatters hard against Wyatt’s arm, shards of glass embedded in his arm. He ignores the sharp sting of pain, ignores the angry cries that swirl above his head. “ _Fight_ , mongrel!” a man snarls from one of the silver gates, his fist beating hard against the metal, and then the older wolf lands on top of him and they crash to the ground amidst the rocks and glass and twisted metal.

The man’s hands reach for his throat, claw at his eyes, scraping at any soft spot they can find. Wyatt’s mind _screams_ at him to get out of there, even as he struggles against the weaker man, even as he shoves him off and rolls over to follow him, pins him to the ground _—_

“ _Kill_ me,” the wolf snarls, his eyes a pale gold, his fangs chipped and dulled and ground down to nothing. “Set me free from this cage. Kill me.”

Wyatt almost backs off, almost lets him up. “No!” he hisses in surprise, and rears back when the man holds up a large piece of glass between them, swiping at his hand. The glass returns in an instant, hovering in the space between their faces, just below the man’s eyes.

“ _Do_ it, pup,” the wolf hisses, and his other hand, the arm that’s half-pinned to the ground under Wyatt’s hand, wraps around his elbow. “Or I’ll do it to you. There’s no sense in a young one like you getting killed by a dead man like me.”

Wyatt’s eyes grow wide in alarm, even as he shakes his head. “No,” he says again, firm in the belief that he is doing the right thing. “No. I won’t. We shouldn’t be killing each other. This isn’t right, this isn’t - this isn’t _—_ ”

The man stares at him, almost in resignation. “Damn you,” he mutters regretfully. “Couldn’t just get one thing in life.” He sighs one last deep, shuddering breath, and then he turns the glass downwards, and plunges it into his own neck. 

Wyatt scrambles backwards, ignorant of the glass spread amongst the dirt that cuts into his palms and the skin of his knees. He watches, mouth open, heart pounding, as the blood bubbles from the man’s throat, as he kicks and shudders and then grows very, very still. The crowd above is silent.

And then, over the creak of the gate opening, they start to boo.

He hears them before he sees them, his ears made sharp by the power of the moonstone around his neck. Three men, not big, but not small either, their boots stomping and shuffling in the dirt as they loom over him. He can smell the sharp poison of the silver around their necks, the heavy reek of the iron chains in their hands. Their grim faces glare at him from the corner of his eye, their lips turned downwards and frustration echoing in their eyes.

He looks at the wolf on the ground, bloody and broken and staring into a space no one can know, and he decides; he will not be like that. He will not die in this ring, begging for another wolf to kill him.

He will not be broken.

He will not be tamed.

He is not the best at fighting, not the most savage of the wolves, but as he rises to his feet, as a growl rips from the back of his throat unbidden, his eyes a gold so deep even the sun could not light them, he finds within himself a power he has never felt before. 

He leaps towards them, strong, unbridled, and when his claws catch in the flesh of the one that leads the way, he doesn’t even remember to be afraid or to feel guilty, to avoid doing damage he doesn’t have to do, like he usually would. He dispatches the other two with the same fury, eyes flashing and teeth bared, and even when one wraps a chain around his fist and buries it into the side of his ribs, he doesn’t feel them crack and bend and bruise beneath his skin. He buries his claws into the man’s throat, deep enough that he feels the blood run hot between his fingers, and then he leaves the man to fall and bounds towards the unguarded gate, his mind already settled on the next most important thing.

_Willa._

_Find Willa._

The hallway is dark and empty, abandoned by the hunters for the bright lights and spectacular views of whatever lies above. “Willa!” he calls, his voice ricocheting off the circular walls, but he can’t hear an answer except for the echoes of his own voice and the nearby whine of some half-dead beast that is not his sister.

He turns right, away from the cage that he had come from, and goes through the rooms one by one. They are all pitch black (he wonders how the humans see down here, when the only way he sees anything is through his moonstone), and most are filled with cages that line the walls, anywhere from six to ten. Wolves sit huddled within the silver bars, gaunt, skeletal creatures that look more like monsters than they do like wolves. Blood drips from injuries old and new and the place stinks - of silver, of rotting meat and festering wounds, of the stale tobacco the hunters love to smoke, when they’re not busy burying their boots in a wolf’s stomach. 

He stops, and he stares, and a shiver runs down his spine, but none of them look up at him even when he calls out, and none of them are Willa. He keeps moving.

There are voices behind him in the hallway, the quick step of boots ringing loud in the concrete hall. He moves faster, tries not to see the other wolves, the ones he can’t help. “Willa!” he calls again, louder this time, and in the distance, he thinks he hears her voice calling his name in return. He yells again and skips several rooms, following the sound of her voice, the loud howl that splits the air and calls him to come to her, to help, to fight. He bolts down the hall, sure of where she is, sure that he can reach her, even as the sound of the humans behind him grows louder and louder.

He rounds the corner, ducks through the doorway, and their eyes meet - his, wild, rolling, his chest pounding as he stares at her, hardly able to believe he found her, and hers inches from the burn of the silver bars that hold her cage, wide and growing wider as they flick from his dirt-stained, bruised cheeks to the doorway behind him _—_

Something hard and heavy and saturated with the stench of thick-plated iron slams into the back of his head and he drops like a stone to the hard-packed floor, spots dancing in his vision.

“I told you to _follow the rules_ ,” Monroe growls, his fingers curling around Wyatt’s neck as he shoves him into the ground, his knee digging into his back. Someone else twists his arm behind his back, too far in a direction it’s not supposed to go. Monroe presses his face to the dirt, pain erupting in so many different places he can’t keep track of it all. 

“You’ll learn. You’ll listen,” their leader says, shoving one last time against his neck before releasing him and returning to his feet. 

Four men lift Wyatt to his feet. All he can hear is Willa, calling for him wildly, the hiss and sizzle of her skin as she pounds against the bars of her cage. For the first time in his life where he is scared, scared of the unknown, of what happens next. 

He’s never been the bravest (that was always, always Willa) but he was brave enough. He’s always done what he had to, even if he didn’t like it, even if the thought of it made his stomach turn. He’s always tried to prove his worth as a wolf, as Beta. But now, torn away from his sister, trapped under the greedy, careless eyes of Monroe, beaten and bruised, Wyatt’s never felt more terrified. 

He thinks trying to find Willa will be the last brave thing he ever does. 

They don’t bother pulling him away or taking him somewhere else to punish him, they just hold him there until Monroe turns back around, getting so close Wyatt can smell the ashes of an old cigarette on his breath. He regards Wyatt with a cold stare and then erupts into laughter, the sound of it chilling with Willa’s screams as its backdrop. 

“I have my work cut out for me.” 

Wyatt doesn’t hear anything else.


	2. so just remember who you are (how you were never one for folding)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for graphic language, depictions of violence.

Wyatt sleeps away the concussion.

The days slip past in a haze of pain and hunger and half-conscious glimpses of hunters and other wolves, dragged from their cages or tossed back into them, fleeting moments in time he struggles to connect to each other. Only the things he dreams make sense to him, in the moment. 

Sometimes they are fractured fantasies of being in the den, or out in the woods, of hunting or fishing or tending to the gardens. Other times, they are memories, recollected as he catches a word or two from the hunters, as he breathes in the distinctive smell of iron and silver, or hears another wolf growl in a cage nearby.

One in particular stays with him for a day or more; a memory from when he was a child, playing tag in the forest with the other pups. It had been late in the night, far past dinner, past when they would usually gather to listen to the elders, and they had wandered towards the spindly peak of the mountain behind the lake, far from their usual territory (they’d been caught up in the thrill of playing amongst unfamiliar rocks and trees, he remembers, they hadn’t meant to wander so far, for so long).

His father had been the one to track them down eventually, when their absence had stretched too long, and Wyatt had thought he would be angry, would cuff them round the ears tell them how foolish they were - but he had only smiled and told them he was glad they were safe and asked them to come home.

He’d lifted Wyatt onto his shoulders and hoisted Willa in his arms, had called for the other pups to follow, before making his way back to their den, not one more word shared between them. 

When they’d returned, he’d sat them all down by the fire and begun to tell them tales they weren’t meant to hear until they were much older. He hadn’t smiled like he usually did when he told a story. Instead, his expression was grim, and he’d avoided his childrens’ eyes as he spoke.

As the sun began to rise, he’d told them story after story about the hunters. 

He’d told them about their ways and their reasonings, about the anger they held inside of them, the violence that raged beneath their skin. He’d told them that some of them were lone wolves, and others hunted in packs, gathering in numbers much larger than theirs. He told them about their weapons, their greatest silver, the only werewolf weakness that didn’t waver or change. He told them about guns and knives and traps, all the awful ways a wolf could be caught under steel jaws or coarse ropes or much, much worse; so many ways that Wyatt felt dizzy just trying to count them all.

 _Some wear necklaces made of silver, like we wear moonstones,_ he had said. _Some want to trap us, some want to kill us, and some...want to tame us,_ he said, his eyes flickering across the crowd of pups spread out around him. _Some—_

 _Tame_ , Willa had asked then, cutting him off. He had met her questioning eyes with serious ones, his hands lowering to his lap. _What does that word mean?_

He shook his head, his eyes turning to the ground. He had stayed silent for so long that the pups gathered around him had started to grow antsy, shifting their arms and bouncing their legs and wriggling around impatiently as they wondered if the story was over. Wyatt had thought he wouldn’t tell them, would save that story for another day or never tell them at all.

 _Some hunters believe that we are meant to be owned and tamed,_ he had whispered, his eyes following the cracks in the floor, the creases sculpted by their ancestors long ago. _That we were made for them to use however they want to. That we’re misguided, a flaw in the system, something to be controlled and put to better use than running free in the wild._

He had shaken his head again, and Wyatt remembers watching his hands, watching the way they had pulled and twisted at his wedding band. 

_There is something important you should always remember pups,_ he had said a few moments later, drawing their attention once again. His eyes had drifted across the sea of pups in the back, and then had settled on Willa, on Wyatt. 

_We were never meant to be tamed._

Wyatt doesn't remember the rest of the story.

## X

The coming of the morning is marked by the stench of raw meat and the rattle in the hallway as the cart that brings it inches closer and closer to their cages. Wyatt sits up as it rattles to a halt and a whistle echoes down the call, blinks as the lights of the room flicker and then turn on, drowning them in cheap fluorescent light. 

He winces, squinting against the sudden brightness after hours of sitting in the dark, and watches as the other wolves lift themselves from the floor and strain against their chains, snarls rippling through the air as each of them are fed. Wyatt is last - he sits on the floor and watches the man that feeds them throw lump after lump of badly-carved meat into the cages. When the man comes to him, his hands are empty and his cigarette droops from the corner of his mouth as he grins.

“Nothing for you again today, fat little puppy,” he says and laughs. “Gotta work if you want your dinner.”

Wyatt doesn’t say anything. He hadn’t been expecting much else; it’s been just the same for three days now. His stomach aches and cramps at the thought of food, at the smell of the bloody rump in the hands of the wolf next door. But he won’t give in to it. He’d decided days ago that they won’t break him this easily, won’t make him beg and grovel and beat himself against the silver bars for one meager meal. He won’t _fight_ for food.

“Poor, sad puppy,” the man says, and laughs at himself. He leaves, and then returns with a plastic bottle full of water. “Look, here’s something special, just for you.” He tosses the bottle between the bars, into Wyatt’s lap, and then he leaves again, his trolley rattling on its merry way down the hall.

Wyatt picks up the plastic bottle, weighing it in his hand. There was a look in the man’s eye, a wicked gleam he doesn’t trust...but he hasn’t had water in two days, and his mouth is dry and his lips are cracked, and there’s nothing sweeter that he can imagine right in this moment than a mouthful of water. He unscrews the cap and takes a long draught, almost dizzy in relief as it slides down his throat.

He drinks it far too quickly, this he knows, draining half the bottle in one go before he can force himself to stop. He takes a breath and waits for his stomach to settle, sipping slowly at the water instead. It’s cold, like it’s just come from a fridge, and it leaves a bitter taste on his tongue, even as he tries to wash it away.

 _Maybe it’s just the plastic of the bottle_ , he tells himself and swallows another mouthful, aware that there is no guarantee he will get water again in the next few days but too hungry and thirsty and sore to care.

When he’s done, he rolls the bottle to the front of his cage and lays back in the dirt, trying to arrange himself in a way that nothing hurts. It’s a fruitless exercise; there’s a lump on the back of his head still from whatever Monroe had hit him down with, and an ache in his back from being stepped on, from an unseen man twisting his arm back so far he couldn’t move for fear of something breaking. There’s cuts on his hands and knees from the glass in the ring, fine, stinging injuries he’d used most of his last ration of water to clean in the hope that they would heal without complication. The rest of his body just _aches_ , from fighting, from running, from being slammed into the ground again and again and again. 

He hopes Willa hurts less than he does.

 _Willa_.

He’d seen her for a brief moment, he knows this for sure. He remembers her face; shocked, hopeful, horrified. He remembers hearing her scream, but he doesn’t remember why. Everything else - how he’d gotten there, most of the fighting in the ring - is vague and blurry, disturbingly hard to recollect. The crack to his skull had knocked most of it out of him, all but the most important parts.

He still remembers the wolf he’d fought, shoving the glass into his own neck. It’s the one part he’d _wanted_ to forget, but he remembers it clear as day.

Home comes clearly to his mind still, at least. When he closes his eyes, he can see the den and the pack, Willa’s stern, irritated glare and Wanda’s blinding smile, her clever, canny eyes. When he drifts off to sleep, he can still run through the valley in his dreams, can stalk a deer in the depths of the woods or swim in the endless blue of the lake between the mountain peaks, the water cold as the sun is hot…

The sound of many boots stomping into the room drags him back to reality.

“Here he is,” Monroe’s voice booms. “The _killer_!” 

“Doesn’t look like a killer,” someone else says, and the boots stop somewhere close to Wyatt’s cage. “Looks like a puppy to me.”

“Well, he’s had some of the good stuff,” Monroe chuckles. “Wouldn’t move him without it after what he did to Ross, would we?”

A key jangles in a lock, far too close for comfort, and Wyatt sits up. His head spins as he does so, a wave of nausea rising from his stomach. Monroe watches him between the bars, as another man swings the door open, and he wants to say something, wants to stand up and show they have not beaten him, but his tongue is thick and his thoughts are slow and his limbs are heavy. Even when the man frees him from his chains he can barely find the strength to lift his hands, to rub his wrists where the metal has blistered and irritated the skin.

“Come on then, mutt,” the man says, and with a grunt he lifts him to his feet. Wyatt staggers at the simple task of standing up, his centre of gravity off, vertigo making the world spin and dip around him. Somewhere in the blur of everything he spots the plastic bottle resting against the bars and his mind returns to the water and the bitter taste it had left upon his tongue.

 _Drugs_ , he thinks, but far too slow, and then they are all but hauling him out of the cage, his feet unsteady beneath him.

“Might have given him a bit more than he needed, boss,” a voice laughs behind him as they take him down the hall, and then a hand shoves him, making him sway and catch himself on the wall. They all laugh as he staggers several steps with all his weight pitched forward and then manages to haul himself upright again, a sheer miracle the only thing keeping him aloft.

“I’ll have to remember to tell Courtney,” Monroe replies, a smile in his voice. “Don’t want him half-asleep when we’re trying to work with him.”

They guide him into a dark room with a single, large cage that spans the width of the back of the room, far larger than the one he has just come from. Wyatt tries to resist them as a hand shoves him towards the door, tries to rally his strength and push back against them...but his efforts are so feeble that they don’t even notice, and when they give him one final push, his legs give out from underneath him and he curls into the dirt, his eyes struggling to stay open, to find focus, no matter how much he wants to fight the empty slumber that calls to him.

The gate slams shut and the lights flick off and he is left alone in the dark to dream of nothing at all.

## X

He doesn’t wake up until their hands are already on him, dragging him upwards and slamming him into the back wall of the cage.

His head aches and his tongue is bitter and he can’t quite remember what is going on until a fist buries itself in his stomach and all the air is driven from his lungs. Then, he realises - he’d only been dreaming of the sun. He is still in the cage, and the hunters are still here.

“Mongrel dog,” the man spits. “Will you fight, like a good dog?” His mind, the weaker side of him, screams for him to submit, to give up, to do _something_. The stubborn side bites his tongue and hangs his head and steels itself against what is about to come.

He hits him again, and again, and then so many times Wyatt loses track. His lungs can’t find a breath to draw in, his ribs crack under the barrage of blows, and when he struggles and bares his teeth towards the man, a fist catches him in the jaw, snapping his head sideways. 

“Bloody beasts,” the man snaps and drops him, stomping from the cage.

Wyatt curls around his beaten bones, the pain already fading into the haze he’s been living in since he came to this room, and waits for his breath. _Is it worth it?_ Wyatt wonders in the dark, in the pain that each rattling breath causes, and he almost forgets to think of the pack, waiting for him to come back home. Of Willa, waiting for him to find her, to help her escape.

 _Willa doesn’t need you_ , a small voice whispers in the back of his mind. _Willa has never needed you._

He almost thinks it’s true...and then, like taking off a coat, he shakes the thought from his mind. He won’t give to their physical abuse, and he won’t be caught by their mind games either.

The hours stretch on.

He doesn’t know what day it is anymore, if it’s morning or night or somewhere in between. There are no windows, there is no light, and everytime he dares to open his eyes he is met by hard fists or metal pipes or brass knuckles. 

It’s not the first time he’s woken like this, not the first time he’s struggled against savage hands and iron fists. They like to come just as he drifts off to sleep, give him a few new bruises and then leave again. It’s all his days are filled with now - hunger, exhaustion, and the haze of pain that clouds his mind like a fog, deep and persistent.

He doesn’t know how long they leave him alone when they aren’t beating him senseless, if it’s minutes or hours or days. They don’t feed him, instead they taunt and tease and laugh when his stomach grumbles, and call him so many names that his foggy mind can’t keep up. They bring him water only when they know they need to to keep him breathing, and it always burns as it goes down his throat, stale and bitter tasting. 

He knows they drug him with it, drug him with whatever concoxion of crushed up pills they have, but he’s learnt already that if he refuses to drink it, they will force it down his throat anyway, and it’s hardly worth the fight when it always ends the same either way. 

“Feeding time, mutt,” someone laughs from outside the bars, and they spit into the dirt at his feet. 

Wyatt wonders if they’ve overdone it on the drugs again, a slip of the dosage, or a purposeful addition. Whatever they’ve done, it makes his hearing fuzzy and his stomach twist and turn at the smell of the raw meat the man throws into the cage. 

He moves back, away from the seeping red meat, and the man outside the cage chuckles, his hands on his hips as he watches the werewolf’s reaction. 

He calls out something in amusement, but Wyatt can’t hear exactly what, his brain struggling to process the words at all. “You should be grateful, dog,” the man says instead, slamming something closed before hoisting it over one shoulder, “It’s expensive to feed a useless mutt like you good meat like that.” 

Something heavy slams in the distance, and he’s left alone again, his body aching, his stomach rolling and his head buzzing. The meat sits in the front of his cage, untouched and completely unappetizing. 

The smell of it makes him sick to the stomach a few minutes later, throwing up nothing but bile that burns at his tongue and the back of his throat as it comes up. 

(He hasn’t eaten in twelve days.)

(The drugs keep him from eating for twelve more.)

## X

He’s barely conscious as they drag him down the halls, their fingers pinching his skin as his lifeless body nearly slips from their grip again. 

One smacks his shoulder with the metal pipe he holds in his other hand, and red hot pain spikes through his body, tearing through his shoulder and beyond. Wyatt tries his best to walk along with them, but his feet won’t move, and his arms are shaking, and his stomach is so empty that he doesn’t even feel hungry anymore. He doesn’t feel anything but the pain that radiates through his body constantly, old and new and never ending.

He flinches when a door opens in front of him, after what feels like miles and miles of walking, and then he’s thrown through it, landing in a heap on a carpeted floor that looks grey but is matted with so many stains of varying colors that its original shade is long since diluted. His limbs are weak, so weak he’s not even sure he’ll be able to get up from the ground; before he can even try, someone grabs him by the collar of his shirt and hauls him upright. 

He’s lost weight, lost muscle, lost the power and the will every wolf should have, with or without their moonstone, and so it’s incredibly easy for the men to do what they like with him, to shove him to the wall so they can beat him, or throw him a few inches away from the silver bars to threaten him, to place a boot on his chest and push and push until he’s sure his ribs will break under the pressure. 

It’s also far too easy for this man to lift him to his feet now, for him to laugh and drag him towards a chair in the corner of the room and throw him carelessly into the wooden seat. He doesn’t move, doesn’t show his teeth or try to growl, just sits there and stares at one of the arms of the chair, unseeing. He should be fighting back, but the part of him that wants to is numbed by the drugs flowing through his system, and his brain is too warped by the paranoia of what would happen if he even attempted it in the first place. 

The man standing before him clicks his tongue and slaps his cheek, hard. “Look at me, mutt,” he growls, his tone promising worse if Wyatt doesn’t listen, if he doesn’t obey. Wyatt looks up, and realizes it’s Monroe standing there, his eyes cold and brimming with impatience. 

“Good,” the man says, his voice softening. He smiles, and then turns around, making his way over to the desk sitting in the middle of the room. 

This new room is tiny, with chipped cement walls and posters of various women and miscellaneous advertisements plastered haphazardly across them, some long faded, some peeling slowly from the wall on which they’re hung. The ceiling is full of holes, small and large, cracking plaster barely holding it all together. There’s another wooden chair pushed in the corner, an iron baseball bat leaning against it, and two metal bars sitting on top of it. 

The desk Monroe goes to is medium-sized, paperwork scattered across the top of it and cigars littered about, burnt ashes and bundles of money stacked toward where the right side of the desk is pushed against the wall. He digs around in the drawer closest to the top, and when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he goes to the drawer underneath, mumbling to himself as he searches.

When he finds what he is looking for, he returns to Wyatt and smiles, wide, malevolent. 

“Now,” he mutters, an evil gleam to his eye. “Let’s start training you right, mutt.”

Minutes pass like hours. There’s words, pain - 

The pain is the last thing he remembers.

## X

“You want to eat, don't you?”

“You want to go back to your Alpha?”

“You want to go home?”

There’s noise all around him, but he doesn’t recognize any of it. Some of it is muffled, and some of it’s not, and some of it makes his hair stand on end. The hunters come in blurs, here one minute, gone the next, and there’s always something inside of him that feels wrong, feels like bugs crawling under his skin, and setting his nerves on edge.

They come to tell him how worthless he is, come to beat him, to degrade and spit and kick at him as he tries desperately to shelter himself from the storm. They hold his arms back, pulling so hard that sometimes he thinks they’re going to break, like he is going to break - but they never quite do, just like he never quite does. They just hurt, so much so that when they drop him to the ground, he can’t throw them out to catch the weight of his body before he slams against dirt.

Sometimes they come with lights, harsh and blinding in his half-conscious state, jolting him from sleep and keeping him awake until he can’t physically keep his eyes open anymore. When they keep him awake days straight is when they do the worst of what they want to do, all blows and bloodied knuckles and silver to skin, chaining him up high and letting him hang until a scream tears from his lips. 

He doesn’t remember everything. 

It gets worse as time drags on, worse after every new beating, after every time he’s dropped dead at Monroe’s feet and everything goes black. It all begins to blur, twisted and misshapen in his mind, words and lies and truths and punches, shocks to the skin that burn and burn and _burn_ , words that don’t make any sense but also _do_ , because when they mention his sister, someone pops into his head, even if he can’t think of their face.

“You’re a bad wolf, you know?” someone tells him, angry and biting and far too close to his ear. “You’re barely even a dog. Look at you. How the fuck are you even still alive?” 

He flinches back when they move their hand, their fingers nowhere near him. He’s not hit, but he feels like he is - and everything’s blurry, and _he doesn’t understand_. The lights are blinding when he blinks, and then there’s noise as someone bangs something heavy and hard against the bars of his cage. 

“Up we go, wolfie!” someone barks with baying laughter, as another unhooks the chains from the back of his cage and drags him into the middle of the room, tossing them high, something catching on something else with a loud _clink_ in his brain. His arms pull, his body pulls, and then he’s beaten until he can’t hear anything else. 

## X

The pain burns at his bones, the sound of metal crashing into metal deafens him to anything else, the dust rising from the floor as they drag him across it clogs his nose and his throat, and then suddenly they drop him in a place with soft light and fresh, sweet air and he’s left so still and alone and _free_ that he nearly suffocates on the feeling of it.

He doesn’t stand, doesn’t do anything but lie there and draw in breath after ragged breath, like he’s been deprived of oxygen since the moment they threw him in a cage.

It only lasts a minute; he blinks, and there are hands grabbing at him, poking and prodding at tender bruises and old, unhealed cuts as they rip his shirt from his body. He’s left breathing hard in the dirt, his bare back exposed to any danger the world could dream up and his mind too far away to realize or care.

From across the way, there is the _crack_ of something snapping in the air.

His head snaps up in fear, a low growl rumbling from the back of his throat as his eyes blink open. He smells them before he sees them; another wolf, their hair matted and mangled and a color he can’t recall the name of, their teeth snapping and sharp and the same dark red as their chin. 

They don’t speak, but someone behind him does, the noise echoing everywhere except where he can hear it. When he doesn’t react, something breaks the air behind him and snaps against his back, slicing into already bruised and tender skin. He cries out, as the other wolf snarls and backs up. 

“Fight!” the human behind him snaps, the whip they’re holding cracking in the still air again when he doesn’t move fast enough. “ _Fight_ , mutt!”

He climbs to his feet, shaky, unsteady, fresh pain like fire rippling across his back. The other wolf darts towards him and he doesn’t know what to do; the whip says to _fight_ , to _win_ , but his instincts say to _run_ , to abstain from the spilling of blood.

“ _Fight_!” the man demands over and over, the thin leather whip in his hand splitting Wyatt’s skin every time he hesitates. 

The instincts fade away with the life in the eyes of the wolf facing him. Only when the other wolf falls, their neck torn open, something dark and red and _rotten_ pooling around their head and sticking to their dark hair, does the pain stop coming.

His back is torn open, bloody and gruesome, a mess of sharp lines that slash and snake and twist, one over another, like lines on an unmarked map. He falls to his knees, and his right leg gives out beneath him, causing him to tumble over into the dirt, the dust from the ground kicking up and entering the raw cuts on his back. He howls, the cry caught on sharp teeth, and someone mutters in approval behind him. He doesn’t know who it is, only that he is afraid of them, even as they approach him and yank his shirt back over his shoulders, the material sticking to his bloody back.

“Good dog,” they tell him, and just as his shoulders slack and he goes to relax, the whip catches his arm, slashing through a diamond he doesn’t know the meaning of. There’s noise again, pipes clanging and raucous laughter, and a voice whispering, “- _but not good enough_.”

## X

 _Light_. 

Yellow, orange, white against his eyelids. Buzzing from overhead, his knee throbbing in pain, his burned hands aching and a stinging in his scarred arms and shredded back. 

He doesn’t refuse anymore. 

He doesn’t fight back or growl or nip at anyone who dares to come close, because either there will be noise, or there will be pain, or there will be a whip waiting for him with a barbed tongue.

The hallway buzzes with lights as he’s moved, his skin scraping against the ground. He’s thrown through the air, landing with a thud that sends pain shooting up his knee and into his hip. Everything hurts, burns, aches. His stomach cramps with hunger and his throat is dry, and his mind isn’t sure what either of those things mean, or what else to do but lie there and wait for them to fade, like they always eventually do.

“Hey now,” someone mumbles from above him, their voice firm and gruff, but soft with something akin to kindness. Their hand lightly slaps at his cheek until he looks up, up into the eyes of someone he...doesn’t remember. A man, one eye of glass, and the other of grey and wearing a face that stirs something akin to fear in his gut for a reason he can’t remember. There’s something in his other hand; he smiles before holding it up for him to see. 

It’s a stone, small and square and the softest blue Wyatt’s ever seen. It glows faintly, dull where the man’s fingers touch it. Something stirs inside him at the sight of it, a deep yearning that cuts deeper than any injury ever could, but he doesn’t know why, doesn’t reach for the stone despite the urging of his stomach and the voice that whispers _moonstone_ in the back of his mind.

Letting out a breath he hadn’t meant to hold, he stares at it with uncomprehending eyes until the man’s smile turns into a smirk. He disappears from sight, Wyatt’s vision too weak and wavering when he tries to follow his movement, and returns with food - food _and water_ , things he hasn’t had in weeks, things he is far more desperate for than any old stone. 

He tries to reach for it, but the man shakes his head and slaps his hand away. “No,” he says, firmly. “Not yet.” 

He waits and waits, and waits longer still; until finally the man speaks again, chewing some of the food in his own mouth, tasting it, savoring it, smiling with all his teeth. 

“Are you going to listen?” he asks him, inching closer. “Are you going to obey?”

Wyatt doesn’t understand. _Listen_ and _obey_ and _bad_ , they say to him, over and over again ( _useless, stupid, feral beast_ ), but he doesn’t know the meanings of the words. He only knows _fight_ , only knows tooth and claw, away from the noise and towards the other monster. He only knows to be savage, to stop or to go, or he will be whipped or he will hang or he will be attacked or he will - 

“Do you yield, _Beta_?”

 _Stop or go. Yes or no._ There are only two things the men ever want him to do. Starving, his mind in a haze, his tongue dry and his body beaten, Wyatt hangs his head and gathers his voice for the first time in forever, the word scraping and bouncing against the back of his throat as he forces it from the depths of his chest. 

“Yes,” he says, and the man chuckles and hands him the food and the water, even goes as far as pressing the moonstone to his skin long enough for some of the smaller wounds on his skin to heal, for the feeling to return to his hands, before pulling it back again.

“ _Good dog_ ,” he tells him, and as he eats, he forgets that he never asked what the word _Beta_ meant. 

## X

Days, weeks, months later (he doesn’t know; there is no time here, just the rotting meat and the bitter water and the blood that sometimes drips from his fingers as the people above him roar), there’s the clang of metal on metal, the shuffling of heavy boots against the dirt of the floor, and then the rattling of chains as rough hands wrap around his upper arms and lift him to his feet. 

His head rolls to the side, his eyelids heavy and his mind dull. A sharp slap jerks him awake, just enough to carry his own weight, and then they press the warm stone to the side of his neck and the power of it floods through his veins and buzzes in his ears. “ _There you go, mutt_ ,” someone croons above him, their shadow blocking the flickering of the overhead lights. “ _Nice and easy now_.”

“ _You shouldn’t talk to it_ ,” another man says, his voice lower, rougher, an edge to his tongue the other one didn’t have. A silver key glints in his hand and the chains fall away, his wrists blissfully free of their heavy weight.

“ _What, you don’t talk to your pets_?” There’s a smile in the first man’s voice. The other grunts, and then four hands drag him from the soft silver bars of the cage and through the dark, dark, dark…

The lights are bright in his eyes, the stone is warm as it’s shoved into his palm, and the ground is hard as he crashes into it and rolls, over and over and over. Above him, a cacophony of cheers and hoots and howls arises, and the sound of it, the panic that shivers down his spine, is what brings him scrambling to his feet. His eyes are blurred, his head pounds, even as his hands move unbidden to tie the stone around his neck...and then he spots her across the way, the other wolf. He can smell her, even coated in dirt and blood and the stench of the spoiled meat that’s caught between her fangs, the smell of it rolling through the air as she bares her teeth at the jeering faces above.

He doesn’t waste time on that. _Run_ , a voice in the back of his mind says and he lunges, quick as a whip and covering the distance between them in just a few long strides. 

_Fight,_ it says, and leaps at her, the light flashing off his bare and bloody claws. 

_Kill_ , it _screams_ , and his claws flash in the light, and the girl howls as they rip through her flesh, digging towards her heart. She baulks and struggles under his weight, shoves him off with snapping teeth and sharp claws that swipe just a little too close to his face. He flinches back and lets her go, but too late - he lifts a hand to his cheek, to the stinging sensation that creeps across his flesh, and his palm comes back bloody. 

Anger swirls in his gut, frustration rising higher and higher as he gets to his feet, and stalks in a slow circle, waiting for an opportunity. He can hear the men behind him at the gate, the ones that had brought him here, yelling at him. Commanding him to strike, to fight. To _win_. 

_Why should you listen to them?_ a small part of him says, but it is silenced by the fear that overtakes him, the rush of adrenaline that narrows his vision down to the ring and the other wolf and nothing else.

“You play their games?” the girl snarls, wiping blood from her lips with the back of her hand. “You a tame little wolf?” He doesn’t understand the words, but he does, but he doesn’t - his head pounds, his vision swirls, and with a grunt of frustration, he shakes his head hard, trying to clear it. 

“You’re no better than they are,” she says, her teeth snapping against each other as her jaw moves. The sounds are as foreign to him as the cries that fill the air above them, the waving hands and jeering faces that try to egg him on.

He growls, a low and gutteral sound that starts in his stomach and rips at his throat as it rises into his mouth. She shivers at the sound, howls to the crowd above, and then leaps at him, trying to sink her teeth into his neck. 

He ducks and turns, and drives his shoulder into her gut. He doesn’t notice her claws catching in his skin, or her fist ripping at his hair as he slams her to the ground. They scrabble in the dirt, strong, angry, _desperate_ ; punching and kicking and biting and clawing. She’s just as fierce as he is, but she thinks too much - he can see it in her eyes, the hatred, the turning of her thoughts as she tries to figure her way out of this, and then-

Only one of his claws has to slice through her neck, deep and sharp and clean, and the thoughts fade from her eyes just as the strength flees from her limbs and the breath from her body. She falls to the ground, choking, dying, her blood staining the packed dirt...and then she becomes still and her face turns slack, her intelligent eyes gone blank and glassy and staring into space.

He rises to the thunder of the crowd above him and stares up at them in disinterest, uncomprehending. Blood drips from his cheek, soaking into the red that runs around his feet, but he forgets to notice; he’s waiting, waiting, for something to happen, for the next fight, for someone to tell him what to-

There’s a loud creak from behind him, the gate opening. He whips around, fast on his feet; so fast, the men that have entered the ring take pause at the doorway, caution in their eyes, their hands frozen where they are, wrapped around the chains they’ve brought with them.

“What are you waiting for?” someone behind them snaps, loud and deep and angry. “Hurry up!” The voice sinks into his mind, like a whip against his back, flaying at his skin - and it isn’t the right words, but it is the same tone, the same anger. _Fight_ , it echoes in his head. _Get in there and fight! Do as you’re told, mutt!_

“ _Fight_ !” he snaps, and leaps towards them, and he doesn’t even realise that it is his own voice that says it, his own language. “ _Fight_!” He picks the man on the left, slams into him so hard the impact rattles his own teeth, and then he shoves the chains aside and rips and slashes and doesn’t stop until the blood runs cold and the fists stop beating at his ribs, at his face. 

The voice behind him shouts again, and he turns for his next victim, his next fight - but the man is gone and he is surrounded, and then something hits the concrete wall behind him, the crack of the impact ringing in his ears. He stops dead; _bad dog_ , his mind tells him, because that’s what the noise means, and then he cringes, low to the ground, curling into himself.

“Stupid dog,” the man with the pipe says, and uses all his strength to hit the wall with it again. “Why is it so _hard_ for you to learn something so _easy_?”

Wyatt doesn’t move. The others, big and heavy enough that he can’t wrestle his way out from underneath them, jump on top of him and pin him to the ground, and then a hand rips the stone from around his neck. The fight fades from his veins just as the power does, all his strength gone in the space of a few seconds, and then he is left, weak and shaking and defeated, pressed into the dirt of the ground.

“ _There you go_ ,” the voice that is almost kind croons somewhere above him. “ _Isn’t that better, pup?_ ” The chain loosens and then drops from his neck, a heavier one wraps around each of his wrists. “ _That’s better now. Come on_ ,” and he doesn’t move, doesn’t try to lift himself off the ground but he doesn’t have to; they drag him from the ring, back into the darkness, all the way back to his cage.

He crashes against the threaded silver of the bars, thrown by rough and careless hands, and slides to the ground in a heap of exhausted limbs, ignorant of his burning flesh. He hears laughter, distant and muffled, as something heavy slams shut in front of him. He doesn’t dare to move, or think, or breathe. The footsteps move away from him but he stays motionless, weak, where he rests, his throbbing cheek pressing against the cold dirt. Eventually he slowly drifts off, his eyes sliping shut.

He dreams of nothing, and nothing fills his head, as the days and weeks drift on and on without him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi my name is roo and i procrastinated posting this chapter for a month.
> 
> please comment i love u


	3. burning bridges one by one (can we even right our wrongs?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh this chapter has been finished for like 4 months it just took us that long to come back and edit it.
> 
> anyway, sorry for the wait! hopefully some of you are still here to read it!

It’s the endless torture of sitting still and doing  _ nothing _ for day after day that almost drives Willa mad.

There’s a dull sort of routine to the days after a while, one that’s just as endless as the tricks Monroe thinks he has up his sleeves. First comes food (they’d tried starving her one week, waved fresh meat in front of her nose like she would break for a morsel of food, but she’s suffered hard winters before and she would not budge, so now they just feed her, unwilling to let her die). Then, most days, she’ll listen to the sounds of some kind of fighting - man or wolf, it’s hard to tell. And then, finally, Monroe comes, ever optimistic, ever sure that one day she will lead him to her pack and let him empty out her den.

Usually, he comes alone, sometimes to talk, sometimes to beat her until she bruises, to listen to her bones crack and smile at her like he can manage her into breaking. Sometimes he will get angry when he doesn’t get his way, will beat his fist against the bars like a wild animal and then bury it in her flesh until he has caused enough pain to be satisfied. It never works for him, no matter how many ways he tries it - even on the days when there’s murder in his eyes and fear flashes through her gut, she stands her ground and doesn’t yield (she’s never been a slave to fear before, and she won’t be now).

Sometimes, he will bring other men with him, men that cower and cringe in fear even as they try to lay their hands on her. Monroe likes watching, she thinks, as she rips those men apart, as she leaves them dead and injured on the floor. She would rip Monroe apart too, if she ever had the chance; but he never quite stumbles into her grip, never makes the same mistake he had the first day they met.

There’s one man, young and skinny and shaking from head to toe even as he threatens her with the long thread of a stock whip, that sticks in her mind. “It will be easier if you just tell him what he wants to know,” he tells her when Monroe leaves the room for a moment, as if he is offering her sage advice.

“Easier for who?” she spits in reply. “For my family, locked up in cages for the rest of their lives? Or easier for you, getting to enjoy killing wolves without the trouble of hunting them?” She laughs in his face. “I’m not going to tell you where they are. I’m going to kill all of you, and then I’m going to go home to my family and be  _ free _ .”

“Would they have you back?” he asks. “After all the people you’ve killed?”

“I’ve killed  _ hunters _ ,” she corrects him. “Not people.”

The boy had taken a step forwards, emboldened by a hesitation he thinks he sees in her face. “You’re a murderer,” he accuses her, loud and aggressive. “What kind of family would live with a murderer?”

Monroe had returned to find the boy dead at Willa’s feet, the word  _ murderer _ sinking in her gut like a stone. 

His visits had waned after that; in the last week or so, she’s found herself sitting alone and untouched for days at a time. She wonders if he’s forgotten about her, if something more important has come up somewhere else - or if he’s just given up on her, if he’ll soon come to put her to the same use all these other wolves serve. That Wyatt serves.

_ Wyatt _ .

She hasn’t seen him in so long; not since the day he’d come bursting into this room and been dragged out, unconscious. She wonders if he’s alive, or dead, or somewhere in between, if he’d escaped and not come back for her, if he’d-

_ No _ . He’s alive and he’s somewhere in this place still, and she will find a way to rescue him. She will find a way out.

Her thoughts are interrupted as a man enters the room, whistling a nameless tune as he drifts from cage to cage with a sick smile, tapping on the bars loudly enough to stir or spook the wolves that don’t immediately register his presence. She watches as he stops at the cage diagonal from hers, the wolf inside skittering to the back of her cage as soon as he’s close, her eyes wide with alarm as his lips curl into a grin. He maneuvers a hand through the bars, his dirty fingernails reaching for her, and the wolf presses herself against the back wall, squeezing her eyes shut and breathing quickly. 

She should keep her mouth shut, should worry about herself and not these half-dead wolves she doesn’t know and cannot save, but she can’t just stand by and watch.

“Hey,” she says, drawing the hunter’s attention. “Hey! Hey! Leave her alone!” The man turns, his cold eyes settling on hers, and she lifts her chin to meet the challenge. “If you think you’re so tough, why don’t you come over here?” 

She knows immediately that it is a mistake, challenging him, making herself the centre of his attention.  _ You’re a sister first and foremost _ , a voice hisses from somewhere in the back of her head.  _ You have a brother to find and a sister to bring him back to.  _ But she’s an Alpha too, a leader, a protector - and what kind of Alpha would she be if she didn’t protect her own kind when she could?

“I was just saying a friendly hello to my favorite dog,” the man chuckles, tapping the other wolf’s cage once more with a calloused knuckle. “But if you insist, Alpha - “

Willa’s heart thuds faster and faster as the man comes to her cage instead, his eyes gleaming with something that makes her realize more than ever that this was all a mistake. She can see the wolf’s eyes on her behind him, can see the fearful hunch of her shoulders as she tries to hide herself away. Willa, for once in her life, wishes she could do the same. 

She might be an Alpha, might be fearless and stubborn and always willing to fight for what she thinks is right, but in this moment, as the man rips the chains from her wrists and cackles when she winces and tries to push him away, she wishes she was more like wise and patient Wyatt instead, who never seemed to find himself in these sorts of situations.

“Come on now, Alpha,” he taunts, pulling her roughly to her feet. “You’re my next pet, courtesy of Monroe.” He yanks her from the cage, throwing her to the dirt so he can climb back out, and even though his hands are bare and his clothes reek of nicotine, there’s something terrifying about the way he grabs her by the hair and pulls her back to her feet. 

He’s stronger than the usual fare of men Monroe brings for her to rip apart, smart enough to stay out of reach of her claws and use her own depleted strength against her. “Stand on your own two feet now, or I’ll shove your face to these bars and you can be sure you’ll never see again,” he tells her, and she can smell the stale alcohol lingering in his breath as it washes across her face. 

His fingers wrap around her waist, his arm hot against her lower back as he tugs her to his side. Panic shoots through her like a bullet from a gun, and she’s reacting with her claws faster than the logical side of her brain can catch up to. She’s able to slice him across the arm, dark red blood oozing from pale skin that is not quite right anymore, jagged and torn, and just as she goes to shove him back and make a run for it, he’s yowling and cursing and then he whistles, loud and sharp. Two other men respond, fast enough that they must have been waiting in the hall outside, one carrying nothing, the other carrying a - 

Her heart drops and the man uses her shock to his advantage, shoving her all the way to the wall, her back slamming into the cement painfully. “I am  _ sick  _ of you,” he mutters, spitting every letter. “I am so sick of you tearing apart my buddies week after goddamn  _ week _ .” 

He gives a quick jerk of his head to the two men standing behind him, and Willa isn’t able to struggle as they each take a hold of her shoulders and the bar of silver is passed over to the man that’s staring her down like she’s his next meal. 

“Monroe thought we’d be able to get information out of you, that we’d find a whole new pack to tame and make money off of. Turns out you’re a stubborn bitch, and all of that was nothing but a waste of time and men.” He twirls the bar around and around, the tip of it glinting in the low light. It’s a short and thin bar of metal plated in pure silver, and the end is sharply curved, like the pokers her pack use to tend the fire pit in the den. Her heartbeat speeds up just looking at it, seeing it in the hands of an angry and unapologetic hunter. 

She wonders if there’s any end to the cruelty humans can come up with.

“This is so that you don’t forget me, or all my friends that you’ve killed. A parting gift, if you will.” He grins, all crooked teeth and yellowed gums. He lifts the poker, gripping it close to the curve so he has a good grip on it and raises it to her face.

“How will your pack look at you after this, Alpha?” 

He laughs as the edge of the poker presses against her cheek and -

She can’t  _ breathe _ .

She can’t breathe, she can’t breathe, and the man presses down harder and harder and harder, until she can’t find the words to describe the feeling of heat that splits her cheek in half, the way that all the fight leaves her limbs as the silver saps it from her bones. Her cheek is burning and her skin is boiling and it takes all of her strength not to scream, not to make a sound, even if silver is the one thing no wolf can stand tall against. The men holding her still are squeezing her shoulders hard enough to hurt, and it doesn’t seem like it will ever end, that this pain will be the last thing she feels, her rank marking sizzling to ashes beneath it. 

But then there’s an angry voice, and the man pulls back. The chill of the air assaults the burn of her cheek and she flinches, squeezing her eyes closed for barely a second in an attempt to collect herself before opening them again.

“Get the hell off her, Vince! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” 

The man, Vince, throws the poker to the side, a loud clunk echoing through the room from where it hits against the bars of a different wolf’s cage. The noise makes her flinch again; it’s the sound of Monroe getting angry, of dead bodies hitting the floor, of this man,  _ Vince _ , tapping at the bars as he makes the rounds of the room, as he burns away everything she ever was and ever will be-

The fear that shivers, unbidden, through her veins is like nothing she has ever felt before.

She swallows the bile climbing her throat at the noise and holds her head high as the man - Woody, she remembers from certain days, with a greying beard and a bald head, the biggest push-over out of all of them - walks over to the men holding her and rips her from their grasp, shoving her back toward her cage. She trips and falls in and the two men who had been holding her follow her in to quickly hook her arms back up to the chains before leaving her, Woody slamming the door shut behind them. 

“And I’ll ask again!” he says when they are alone, when it is just him and Vince and the cowering wolves around them, “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing? We’re specifically keeping her alive to find her goddamn pack!” 

Vince shakes his head, looking so sure of himself that if Willa could she’d reach through the bars and tear the smirk from his lips. “Not anymore. Monroe said we could do what we wanted with her. So I did what I wanted.” 

Woody looks surprised, but before he can say anything else Vince is making his way toward the door. “I’ll see you soon, Alpha,” he calls back to Willa. “If I can even call you that anymore. They say, after all, that a wolf without one of these…” 

He trails off, tapping his cheek, his eyes gleaming. “...is nothing but a stray.” 

He laughs, a sound that booms in the air and bounces from cage to cage, before disappearing with the other men out the door. Woody sighs and turns away, throwing his arms up and muttering under his breath. It takes him several seconds to realise Willa is on her feet again, watching him with silent eyes.

“They’ve given up on you, you know,” he tells her, turning back to her. “It only gets worse from here.”

“What do you care?” Willa spits, her teeth bared.

She’s careful of the bars, refuses to get too close to them, to allow this man to grab her like the other had in fear of what could happen. He didn’t  _ seem  _ like he was the same kind of monster as the rest of them...but he was still a hunter, no matter how soft he made himself out to be.

“I don’t,” he replies honestly, leaning on his side of the bars, his arms crossed over his chest. His smile is crooked, lifting only one side of his lips. “I just like you better like this than like...these others. Especially the ones Vince gets his hands on.” 

Her stomach turns at the very thought, the man’s earlier threats still bouncing around her head, but she swallows the fear and the hatred and watches Woody with narrowed eyes as he glances down at his dirty boots, scuffing the ground with his toe. 

“I’m just saying,” he continues, “that I’ll give you one last chance. If you want it.” He looks up, his eyes meeting hers. 

She snarls, her lips lifting to show sharp teeth. “I don’t need your help,” she hisses, her face inches away from the bars, threatening enough that Woody actually twitches and rocks back on his heels so that he’s a step further away. 

“Listen, Alpha,” he tries again. “Monroe doesn’t care anymore, alright? He’s going to get rid of you, one way or another. I can give you a fighting chance, at the very least. I can make you a deal.” 

Willa’s silent, mulling it over. If he’s telling the truth (would he be lying? Would this be an elaborate plot to convince her to trust them?), then she doesn’t have much time left to get out of here. She doesn’t know where Wyatt is either, or what condition he’s in, or where or how to escape.

She can’t trust Woody, or anyone here...but maybe she can use him, if she’s cunning enough. If she’s correct in thinking that he’s not trying to fool her, that he really is such a soft heart working in a cold place like this. Even if he’s telling the truth, she’s dead anyway. She might as well use this opportunity to try to find Wyatt while she can.

She takes a step back from the bars and Woody visibility relaxes. “What kind of deal?” she asks. 

His smile widens. Willa wonders what’s in it for him, if he’s the one to bring the prize to Monroe. “If you tell me where your pack is, then I’ll protect you,” he says, and she scowls at him, unimpressed.

“Protect me?” she growls, like he’s joking, and he nods enthusiastically. 

“From the other folks here,” he elaborates, his eyes falling on the wound on her cheek. “They’re good boys but some of ‘em, well...you saw Vince. But they’ll stay away, if I tell them to. They’ll listen to me.” 

The plan begins to form in her mind before he’s even done talking. “I don’t need your protection. I can protect myself.”

Woody frowns, soft and sad and so  _ honest _ that she almost grins in triumph. “What do you want, then?” he asks.

She straightens, her pain and her anger forgotten in the rush of adrenaline at this  _ chance _ that he has given her, served on a silver platter. “I want to see the wolf that came here with me. I want to know that he’s okay.”

Woody’s frown deepens as he mulls it over. “And if I’m able to tell you the wolf is okay - “ 

“No,” she interrupts. “I want to see him.” 

“ _ See _ him?” he repeats incredulously and she nods. 

“If you bring me to him, I’ll tell you where my pack is,” she lies. “I’ll lead you right to the den if “Fine then,” Woody agrees. “How can I find him?” 

“His name is Wyatt,” she says. “He has this mark.” She points to the big diamond inked onto her arm, the mark of her pack. “Find him.”

His lips press together, his gaze shifting as he considers it. Then, he stands straight and steps out of the cage, whistling loudly as his attention turns down the hall. A woman appears from the shadows in the next moment, her face pinched and a metal bar clutched in her fist.

“What do you want?” she snaps, her feet never pausing, like she has somewhere to be and no time to stop. 

“Need you to find me a wolf,” Woody says, and she laughs.

“Look around you, idiot,” she says, waving a hand to the room at large. “There’s five of them right here.” She goes to leave, still chuckling at her own joke, but he grabs her by the arm and drags her forcefully back into the light.

“I need a  _ specific _ one,” he says, and pulls her over to Willa’s cage. “One of the males. It’s got that big star thing somewhere on its arm.”

The woman peers through the bars, her eyes tracing the pack mark. “Yeah, I’ve seen that somewhere before,” she says and twirls the bar in her hand idly.

He stares at her. “...so can you find it?” he asks, like he’s expecting her to jump to attention.

The look she gives him is scathing; for a moment, Willa thinks she might just hit  _ him _ with the bar and be done with it. “Fine,” is all she says though, pushing off the bars with a sigh. “You’re explaining to Monroe why the new ones haven’t been moved, though.”

“Whatever makes you happy, Annie,” Woody agrees is a voice that is long-suffering. She disappears, her footsteps echoing down the hallway outside and he turns back to Willa, his brow pinched in frustration, his calm demeanour snapped in two.

“Nice doing business with you,” Willa says and lets the faintest smirk pass over her lips.

“Keep your mouth shut, mutt, or I’ll shut it for you,” he snaps, and turns his back to her, his massive form blocking the doorway of her cell as he waits.

It takes less than five minutes for the woman -  _ Annie _ , Willa reminds herself, and stores the name away for future reference - to return. The bar has disappeared from her hands, replaced by a scrap of paper that stinks of ink and the stale coffee that stains its corner. “Found your mongrel,” she says as she tucks the paper into her pocket. “He’s in the deluxe suite. Your favourite, actually; if you took a better look at him, maybe you’d recognise him when someone’s talking about him.”

She grins, all split lips and cruel humour, and disappears just as quickly as she had appeared.

“Take me to him,” Willa demands, and Woody whirls around to face her.

“You know he’s alive now,” he says and leans forward, trying to be threatening. She steels her nerve and decides that she is not afraid. “Tell me where your pack is.”

“You  _ say  _ that he’s alive,” she argues. “Your word’s worth fucking  _ nothing _ to me. Take me to see him, or I’m not telling you anything.”

Woody glares at her, and then huffs in frustration and crosses the room to retrieve a key and a steel pipe, similar to the one Annie had been carrying when she’d first appeared. “No funny business,” he warns her as he returns, holding up the pipe like a promise. Willa doesn’t respond, just shuffles to the side so that he can unlock the chains that tie her to her cell. 

“Go on then,” he says and shoves her towards the door, her arm brushing against the bars of the cell. “On your feet.” She hisses as the silver sizzles against her skin but doesn’t make any other noise, just gets dutifully to her feet and stumbles out of the cell. 

Her legs are weak and useless beneath her, their strength gone from the weeks of inactivity, the absence of her moonstone and the silver that had been pressed to her cheek, poison soaking through her skin. For a moment, she stands and wonders if she can even walk still, or if she will be crippled for the rest of her life; and then the pipe prods her hard in the back, right between the shoulder blades, and she is forced to take one step and then another, out of the room full of cages and into the dark hallway beyond.

The corridor is low-roofed and fully encased in concrete, dim electric lights buzzing and flickering unsteadily overhead, emitting just enough light to not trip over your own feet. She’s surprised to find it runs on a circular path, curving away to either direction. A rough hand shoves her left and she turns and walks, her fingers pressed to the smooth, machine-hewn surface of the wall for support.

They pass five doorways in total, empty holes that lead to more dark and windowless rooms. She can scent the sharp tang of the silver bars that make the cages within, and the stench of the wolves wasting away inside them.  _ How many _ ? she wonders, but she doesn’t ask, doesn’t try to do the math. She doesn’t want to know; if she knows, she will feel like she has to save them all, and if she tries to save them all, she could lose Wyatt in the mess it would make. If she pretends there are no others, that there is only one wolf to free before she can escape from this mess, it almost seems possible.

If Wyatt is dead, if this is all a trick, then she will burn it to the ground, herself and the nameless wolves around her be damned.

“You know,” Woody muses behind her as they walk, tapping the metal bar idly against his leg. “You and him look kind of similar. Apart from the like…tattoos.”

“We’re twins,” Willa snaps without thinking, and then curses herself as she realises she’s said more than she should have.

“ _ Twins _ ,” Woody repeats with great interest, and then he stops at the sixth door and turns her towards it, plunging her two steps into a pitch-black hole filled with the stale smell of rotten meat and old blood. A light switch clicks behind her, and the room floods with light - it is empty, except for one large cage at the back, and a twisted form in tattered clothing curled up in one corner.

“Doesn’t look like much of a beast, your brother, but he does his job,” Woody grumbles and wraps a hand around her arm, pulling her forwards. Her feet move on their own, her eyes fixed to the form of a wolf that looks nothing like her brother...and yet she can see the pack mark, stark against the skin of his forearm, and the tuft of white hair at his brow, partially stained rust-red and crusted in mud.

“What have you done to him?” she whispers before she can stop herself, horrified. 

“What, me?” Woody shrugs. “I haven’t done anything to him. I  _ wouldn’t  _ do anything to him - he’s won me a lot of money, he has.” 

Willa reels and then snaps herself back to consciousness, almost ripped her arm out of his tight grip. “Is he  _ alive _ ?” she asks, pragmatic, and tries to stop her voice from shaking.

“Of course he is,” the man assures her. “You’ve just caught him in the middle of nap time. Look.” He lifts the metal pipe and cracks it against the bars several times. The noise of it is so loud that she flinches and tries to cover her ears, but Wyatt barely stirs, only the barest flicker of movement to let her know he is alive.

“Let me see him,” she demands, before she’s really thought it through. “Let me...let me go in there. I have to see him awake.”

The man’s eyes turn to her, the bar still half-lifted like he might strike her with it - and then he  _ laughs _ at her, his voice loud and booming. “Go  _ in  _ there?” he repeats, like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “You want to go in there? With him?”

“Yes!” She struggles against his grip, trying to get out of reach of the pipe, and to her surprise, he lets her go, laughing again. “He’s my brother! Why wouldn’t I want to go in?”

“Oh, no reason,” Woody says, an amused light dancing in his eyes, and turns to fetch the silver key from where it hangs on the wall behind him. “You can go in. As a treat.”

She doesn’t trust him, not the humour that dances in his eyes nor the way he leaves her free to run, or attack, or howl to the other wolves while he unlocks the cage. Her eyes turn towards the open doorway, the thought of the empty corridor beyond, where there hadn’t been a single sign of life...but then they turn back to Wyatt, and she realises that he knows as well as she does that even given the chance to run away, she won’t leave her brother in that cage.

The door swings open, iron bars laced with a pattern of pretty, deadly silver, and she willingly steps into the cage and listens as it slams shut behind her.

Wyatt stirs, his head turning into the crook of his arm, a whisper of movement that promises he is still here with her even if he is bloody and battered and bruised. She glances behind her, expecting to see Woody’s amused eyes behind her still, but he is gone, disappeared back out into the hallway. It doesn’t make sense, she thinks as she turns back to Wyatt, her mind working overtime to figure it out. It just won’t add up; him letting her into the cage so easily, how surprised he’d been that she wanted to go in, and now his sudden disappearance, his willingness to leave them alone together. 

Her mind swirls with questions, hazy from lack of nutrition, overwhelmed by the sight of her brother, alive, in front of her. There was a part of her that thought she would never see him again, and though the man leaving her alone still had her nerves on edge, she pushes past the feeling and takes a step towards him.

“Wyatt?” she whispers, her voice shaking. 

Another step. 

Shaking, a small moan escaping his mouth as bruised flesh and strained muscle flexes and shifts, lifting him off the ground. His head hangs, his hair in his eyes and his shoulders hunched, and he struggles to his feet like a puppet being lifted on twisted strings, sideways and staggering, his limbs unsure of how to hold him up.

He’s thinner than she is, his body stripped down to corded muscle and protruding bone. His flesh is mottled black and blue by bruises everywhere that she can see, crusted with dried blood from wounds that haven’t been cleaned or even begun to heal. One of his knees is tight and swollen, and he favours it as he struggles to his feet, trying to balance solely on his other foot. She curses under her breath and steps forward to help him, only able to see the way his body skews sideways, how close he is to falling.

As she moves, his head snaps upwards, his eyes drawn to the movement. She opens her mouth to say something, but the words die in her throat; he is slack-jawed, his face hollow, his eyes dead and staring like a rabbit left to struggle too long in a trap not made for killing. 

“Wyatt,” she says, gathering up her voice in the way she usually would when he is ignoring her, when she has called four times and her patience is running thin, and searches his face for any kind of acknowledgement. He doesn’t even blink, doesn’t smile or sigh or speak a single word - just stares at her blankly, like he has no idea who she is. 

“What have they done to you?” she whispers, and closes the gap between them. She reaches out, towards his face, towards the deep gash that mars his cheek, puffy and ugly and weeping. Her fingers land softly just below it, cold against the hot and inflamed skin. 

She breathes out.

He bares his teeth, and growls.

With a gasp, Willa snatches her hand away and backpedals, eyes wide and legs shaking. “Wyatt?” she asks as he follows her, hunched and stalking her like he would a deer in the forest, his eyes flashing dangerously. “What are you doing? Stop!”

Laughter rises from behind her - she glances back, and finds Woody standing with three others, watching. There’s a satisfied smirk creasing the lines of his face, the key to the door dangling from his fingers as he watches the show, and now she understands why he’d been so willing to let her in here. Why he’d found it so funny that she wanted to be so close to Wyatt in the first place. Why-

In the few seconds that she’s distracted, Wyatt lunges, and his fingers wrap around her neck, tight enough that she can’t breathe. Even malnourished as he is, he’s heavy enough to knock her off balance - she falls backwards, and the force of his weight slamming her into the ground knocks the air out of her lungs in one giant gasp. He doesn’t let her draw another.

Desperate, choking, she claws at his fingers, and then draws her feet up and kicks at his swollen knee. She regrets it the moment he rolls off her, howling in pain - it’s  _ Wyatt _ , her  _ brother _ , and she’s the one that’s caused the ungodly sound that slips from his tongue as he backs off. “Get after him!” a man’s voice yells behind her, but she ignores it, drawing several deep breaths into her lungs in quick succession, trying to replace the oxygen she’d been deprived of.

Wyatt doesn’t stay down for more than three seconds before he’s up again, barely rising to his feet before leaping at her. She scrambles backwards, shoves him off before his claws can sink into her skin and tries to rise again. He slams bodily into her as she stands and she falls again - only this time, she lands against the bars, her back pressed so hard to the silver inlay that it burns its swirling pattern into her skin even where she should be protected by her shirt.

_ “Wyatt! _ ” she gasps through the pain and tries to throw him off her, but he has her pinned this time - he bears down against her chest, stronger than any wolf she’s ever fought before, and she screeches at the pain, loud and shrill. She stares at him with wide and panicked eyes, and wonders what happened to her little brother who couldn’t even land her in the dirt before they came here.

“Enough!” someone roars behind her, and the sound of metal striking metal fills the cage, the bars against her back vibrating from the impact of something hitting them. “Get back!” the voice hisses and hits the bars again, and at the sound of the command, Wyatt flinches away, freeing her from the trap he’d caught her in. 

She leans forwards, shoving herself away from the silver that burns, and stares as the men enter the cage, dragging Wyatt away from her. They shove him backwards, slam him into the concrete of the back wall, and when he roars and lunges at one of them, eyes rolling like a feral animal, the metal pipe that had rapped against the bars catches him square in the gut, once, twice, and then three times more, until he falls to the ground and stays there, wheezing for breath.

Four of the hands grab at her, lifting her up even as the burns on her back scream for forgiveness, for anything that might soothe them, and drag her backwards out of the cage. They drag her all the way back to her own, down the dark, curved hallway, past the doorways and the silver cages and the wolves she doesn’t want to know exist, her boots bouncing along the smooth floor with no life to try and lift her weight themselves.

The chains slam back around her wrists, the clicks of the locks as damning as the weight of them, too heavy for her to lift. She forgets to fight them, to spit and curse and struggle against them as they shackle her to her fate. Her head is still full of Wyatt’s empty eyes, of bruised flesh and bony fingers trying to squeeze the life out of her neck.

“Hey!” a voice says, barely acknowledged, and a sharp palm slaps hard at her cheek, leaving her flesh stinging. She blinks, and looks up; and she finds herself staring into the grey, evil eyes of Monroe, the nightmare that never leaves her alone.

“You got what you wanted,” he says, crouching in front of her. He’s close enough for her to reach out and grab him, to rake her claws through the soft flesh of his neck, to stab at his eyes and hope that she reaches deep enough. She doesn’t do it though - her arms are exhausted and shaking, the chains heavy around her wrists like she is tied to the floor, to the packed earth below them.

“Where’s your pack?” he asks, and she draws in a sharp breath.

“What did you do to him?” she replies instead of answering his question. Monroe rocks back on his haunches, annoyance crossing his face. “My brother. Why did he do that?”

“No,” he says firmly. “No, you made an agreement. Woody proves your brother is alive, and you tell us where your pack is. Time for you to uphold your end of the bargain.”

She spits a laugh at him, short and devoid of humour. “Like I’d  _ ever _ tell you where my pack is,” she seethes. “Like I’d let you march into our den and bring all of them to their deaths. I’m not fucking  _ stupid _ . Not like you.”

He slaps her again, hard enough that her head snaps painfully to the side. She turns back to him with a scowl and spits at him. It lands on his shoulder as he dodges, just narrowly missing his face.

“Bitch of an animal,” he mutters and wipes at it with his sleeve. “You’ve got one last chance to give me what I want, dog, or you’ll be put to better uses.” His head tilts towards the door, and the distant sound of jeering crowds, clapping and screaming and thundering about in a place she cannot see.

A shiver runs down her spine. She ignores it.

“What,” she says slowly, so he cannot misunderstand her. “Did you  _ do. _ To my  _ brother _ .”

He sighs, his lips pressed together in grim acceptance. “Alright then,” he says and stands, retreating to the doorway to her cage, the same place Woody had stood when he had agreed to take her to Wyatt, knowing full well what she would find. “You want to know what we did to him?”

She nods. His lips curve upwards in a cruel imitation of a smile.

“We did what you do with any feral animal,” he tells her. “We broke him down, and we trained him up. I do a good job with them, don’t you think?”

“Trained him for  _ what _ ?” Willa asks, aghast at the very thought of a werewolf being able to be  _ trained _ or  _ tamed _ or  _ broken _ .

“Isn’t it obvious?” he says as he closes the door to her cage, the click of the lock the final seal to her fate. “No, your kind are too stupid to understand. Don’t worry, you’ll understand soon. You’ll see what I mean.”

He walks out with a smile on his face, knowing full well of the shudder that runs down her spine at his final words.

##  X

“Up, mutt!”

The voice comes from somewhere above her, ripping her from slumber as meaty hands rattle the door of her cage. She blinks her way to alertness, shakes the sand from her eyes as she sits up - and then turns her eyes to her attendant; Woody, the man from yesterday, smiling down at her with an excited gleam to his eye that promises nothing good. Two other men stand behind her, bars of iron and silver in their hands, their faces impassive as they wait for her to wake.

Her stomach twists, thinking of what he’d let her walk into the day before, the ache in her burnt back. She shakes the feeling away, stands up and looks him in the eye and tells herself she’s not afraid. 

She’s the Alpha. 

She’s not afraid.

“It’s your special day,” he says as he unlocks the door and steps inside, sliding the key into his breast pocket. “I might even put ten dollars down on you. Reckon you might be stronger than most of these mutts...”

“Don’t talk to the mongrels, Woody,” one of the men behind him snaps, and the man rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything more, no matter how much he looks like he wants to.

“What are you talking about?” Willa asks, but Woody only smiles to himself and reaches for her chains. One of the others reaches around him to rap her hard across the shoulders with his pipe.

“Quiet,” he snaps, and then hits her again when she rolls her eyes. She buckles under the weight of the blows, half-falls and takes a few deep breaths before rising again, telling herself firmly not to push the limits again with this one.

“Ready,” Woody mumbles when she is free of the chains and steps back out of the way. The one that had hit her - young, blonde, a pretty face ruined by the cruel edge of his grin, the missing tooth in the front of his jaw - prods her forwards and out the door, the hollow end of the pipe pressing circles into her spine. She holds her head high and pretends it doesn't hurt to walk, that she doesn’t want to hiss and arch her back and pull away every time the young one pokes at the burnt and tender skin there.

They lead her out of the room and down the hallway, right this time, not left, not towards Wyatt. She hears cheering, hears hoots and hollers and a loud, broken howl that sends a shiver down her spine, but she can’t stop.

“Another win,” Woody says with a chuckle from somewhere behind her, the pipe pushing into her back “Two hundred and fifty for me.”

“Oh yeah?” another replies, and barks a laugh. “And how much did you start with, huh?”

There’s a long silence, and then Woody mutters, “Two hundred.”

They burst into raucous laughter, loud enough that it bounces around the hallway and drowns out the sound of the crowd somewhere above them, the howling that was too broken to be any wolf’s call. “That’s what you get for betting on the favourite!” the blonde man barks, and then a hand grabs Willa by the collar and jerks her to a halt, turning her inwards towards a short passage filled with light. A gate of pure silver stands open at the other end, dazzling in the bright lights that come from whatever is beyond it.

A hand grabs her wrist, forcing her to raise her hand, palm upwards, and then presses something warm and hard into her grasp, closing her fingers around it.  _ A moonstone _ , she realises a second later, and the rush of power long vacant that floods her veins is dizzying, even as they shove her forwards, through the door, and slam it shut behind her. 

Face-down in the dirt, she ties the moonstone around her neck, blinks away the blurriness, the spinning of her vision, and rises, first to her knees, then to her feet. And then she stares at her strange surroundings - at the tall concrete walls, standing in a circle around her, at the bright lights overhead...and at the crowd of men and women with silver arrows hanging around their necks, practically hanging over the edge of the bowl as they screech and cheer and scream at her to do whatever it is they want her to do.

A sharp squeal, a yelp of pain, sounds from right in front of her, and her eyes travel back down to the ring - to the wolf by the other silver gate, restrained in the arms of two large men, one of their necklaces pressed deep into the flesh of his shoulder. The wolf struggles and strains against their grip, trying to wriggle away from the burning silver even as the people above them laugh at his futile efforts-

Her heart stops as she realises the wolf is Wyatt. Her brother.

A sharp whistle sounds from above them, and the ring goes quiet, the crowd rearing back and turning to address the whistler. Willa’s eyes snap upwards, though she knows who it will be - Monroe, standing tall and cruel and proud right above Wyatt, smiling down at her like he is a god and she is the scum he has allowed to walk the earth.

“Time to begin!” he shouts down to the men that hold her brother, even as they torture him. “Let them fight!” 

Reluctantly, the men take back their necklace and let Wyatt go, shoving him into the ground so that they have time to turn tail and run away, out of the reach of either wolf. He tumbles into the dirt, his swollen leg giving out from underneath him at the slightest shove - and then springs back to his feet again, quick as lightning, his whole body tensed and coiled as his eyes land on her.

She shivers under his gaze. His eyes are empty; blank, emotionless, a monster made from the bottom up, a machine trained to kill and kill and kill until there’s nothing left to destroy. She can’t  _ begin _ to fathom what they have done to make him this way, so unlike himself, so cold and empty and dead to the world, even as he destroys it.

She remembers meeting his eyes across the table at dinner, her mother on his left, her father to her right, his eyes crinkling at the corners with laughter. She remembers staring at him when they had to fight for their places in the pack, his gaze filled with a secret determination to lose to let her take the place he’d already known was hers. She remembers the moonstone, their hunt for it, and the hopelessness she felt like she always had in her eyes, the determination that always burned brightly in his.

Now…

Now her brother is gone and she doesn’t think she will ever forget the feeling of her heart breaking, cracking into a million tiny pieces at the thought that she’s  _ lost him _ , she’s lost him for good - her best friend, her beta- 

Her brother.

Everything is silent.

There’s a moment, fleeting, but  _ there _ , where nothing moves. Her brother stands, perfectly still, perfectly broken, on his side of the ring, the dust rising slowly around him. The crowd above them watches with bated breath. 

Willa grinds her heel into the dirt, shoves a breath down into the bottom of her lungs, and tries to prepare herself for what she knows comes next.

“ _ Come on, mutts _ !” a voice shouts from above, rough and guttural. Like an elastic band, the silence snaps in two.

Wyatt is on her faster than she can even  _ blink _ \- impossibly fast, even for a werewolf. She leaps out of the way, bites her lip as he hits the wall to the roar of the crowd, and shoves away the guilt of having caused him pain. Wyatt feels nothing. He bounces bodily off the wall and back to his feet and chases after her again, a growl ripping from his throat as the crowd cheers him on. 

Her mind moves fast - faster than her feet, as she tries to dodge a second time and gets caught by the point of his shoulder as he stumbles past, sending her spinning. His eyes are blank, his jaw slack, face empty of any emotion. He moves like an injured animal more than any wolf she’s ever seen.  _ Tame _ , her father’s voice echoes in her ear, like a ghost.  _ Something to be put to use. To be controlled. _

So how, then, did they control him? 

Her eyes glance upwards, just for a second. Monroe stands there still, his grip on the edge of the wall white-knuckled, his expression murderous. He wants her to fight, wants them to go down in a kicking, screaming mess that only one will step out of.

He wants her to kill her brother, or to  _ die _ .

No, he is not the answer. It comes to her in a flash, buried in the memory of all that had happened the day before, the horror of finding her brother... _ like this _ . She’d been pinned to the bars, choking, burning, stuck with no way out...and they had hit the bars. They’d ordered him back, the same way Monroe had ordered them to fight. They’d hurt him, until he lay down and let them do what they liked, to him and his prey.

How does a hunter control a wolf? 

The answer is obvious. After all, pain and fear is all these people know.

“ _ Fight _ !” The word rises up over the sound of the rest of the hunters, loud and screeching, and Wyatt jerks upright, his eyes fixed on her again. There’s a flash of something deep within them - not recognition, not pain or confusion or anger or determination. Something foreign, something they’ve trained into him, the dull registration of a command he must follow. He coils, muscles tensing, preparing to jump, and Willa steels herself.

This time when he leaps, when she dives out of the way of his blind charge, she does not let him find his feet again. She turns and she lunges after him, pins him to the ground and holds him there with grim determination as he howls and struggles and tries desperately with all his strength to throw her off.

“Stop!” she commands him, drawing up all the power she can find in the second-hand moonstone that clings to her neck. It’s been a long time since she’s been an Alpha; for a second, she thinks it hasn’t worked. And then he stops and stares at her, almost like he’s waiting for what comes next.

Slowly, she gets to her feet and steps back, allowing him to pull himself upright (he is still lopsided, still swaying on one good leg, half-conscious. Half- _ dead _ ). “Wyatt,” she says, softer now, and only just keeps a steady voice as she speaks. “It’s me. Willa. Don’t you...remember?”

His eyes are hazy and unfocused, his head shaking violently from side to side as her words register with something buried deep inside his mind. She feels faint, relief flooding her veins, because he is  _ in there _ , he is still  _ Wyatt _ , somewhere deep down. She can still  _ reach _ him, even here, even in this ring, with Monroe-

“Wolf!” the hunter’s voice booms from above, as if summoned by her thoughts. Wyatt’s eyes snap upwards, a shiver running down his spine, all of his attention stolen by his master’s call.

“Fight!” Monroe demands, in a voice that promises terrible things to those who disobey. Wyatt turns back to her.

“No!” Willa shouts, but her voice is shaky and Wyatt doesn’t even blink, lost to her again.  _ No! _ Laughter echoes down to her, cold, hard humour glinting at her from Monroe’s eyes. Anger swirls in her gut at the sight of him, and around him, the faces of all the people that have held them captive here. The people that want them to be mindless beasts, to fight and kill each other for their entertainment. The anger grows and grows and grows, blinding her eyes, roaring in her ears, louder than any crowd-

Wyatt strikes at her with his claws, fingers stained with dirt and blood and burns from the silver bars of his cage. This time, she strikes back, her own nails ripping through the tough skin and corded muscle of his shoulder and drawing fresh blood. It stains the rags of his shirt bright crimson, even as he howls and stumbles back a step, as if he is surprised that she has hurt him.

“Stop!” she shouts, and draws herself up to her full height, baring her teeth at him. She has  _ always  _ been the stronger of the two of them - taller, faster, better. The most dominant. That’s why  _ she _ leads the pack, why he is Beta.

He moves as if to attack her again, but there’s a hesitation in the movement, a confusion in his eyes that makes it easy for her to shove him away. Her fingers press against the fresh wound on his shoulder. He yelps like he’s been shot and stumbles back, clutching at his arm.

“Stop it,” she growls and advances, never giving him a moment’s respite. “You listen to  _ me _ , not to them.” He submits under the pressure, backpedalling until he hits the curving wall of the ring and can go no further. 

“ _ I’m _ the Alpha!” she screams; to Wyatt, to Monroe, to the hunters that watch on, wide-eyed and stunned into silence. Her eyes are fixed only on her brother, this shell of a wolf that cowers before her. “You obey  _ me _ !”

“No!” Monroe shouts from above, angry, panicking. “No! Wolf! Get her!” Wyatt doesn’t even flinch at his words, not a ripple of recognition running through his face. Willa looks up at Monroe and smiles with all her teeth.

“You should  _ never _ challenge an Alpha,” she spits at him, like venom from her mouth. “My pack is  _ mine _ to control, and no one else’s.”

Monroe looks past her, towards the gates, and whistles sharply - a summons to his men, she realises, as they appear from behind the silver bars, peering upwards. “Get in there!” he orders them. “Teach this animal a lesson!”

Her eyes flick to the group of men fumbling with the lock of the gate. She can see their hands shaking from where she stands, and almost decides that that will be their way out. But no; it’s too risky. She’s come too far to take such a big risk, with silver gates that could snap shut on either side of them and men who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her the first chance they got. 

She watches as Monroe shouts angrily above her, his arms flailing about in a rage, his face beet red. Her eyes move to the crowd, unsure and shifting anxiously in their seats, some quiet, others murmuring worriedly to one another. It fills her with a sense of twisted pride, seeing how fast they went from cheering for her death to worrying about their own. As her eyes scan the crowd, moving from one face to the next, she realizes that the only way out is obvious. 

Not as risky as the gates, but risky in its own way, in how much control she has over Wyatt, and in hoping that there wasn’t anything more than angry men waiting for them at the top, that the hunters hadn’t expected anyone to escape this way. 

_ No _ , she thinks, looking back to her brother. He stares at her, one hand still clutching at his newly injured shoulder. Her heart constricts at the damage she’s done, at the pain she’s caused the one person she cares about more than anyone else in the entire world, but she pushes those thoughts from her mind. She’ll have time to worry later, after they were free. 

No, Monroe wouldn’t have expected anyone to try and fight their way out over the wall. He’s far too confident in the ‘training’ of the wolves, and in himself.  _ It’s the only way out _ , she reminds herself as the hunters yell and scream at each other from behind the silver gate, unable to get it open.

“Climb,” she snaps at Wyatt, her eyes flashing yellow, her voice pitching into a growl. He stares at her, uncomprehending, until she huffs and grabs him by the shoulder, turning him to face the wall. “ _ Climb _ !” she insists and backs up, just far enough that she can get a running start. It takes all of her strength to bound up the wall and hook her fingers over the edge, to pull herself up before any of the hunters at the top can shove her off and send her crashing to the ground again.

She lands in a space that seems to have been built more as a warehouse than a hunter’s den, with large iron beams supporting crumbling ceilings and overhead lights hanging low. There’s rows and rows of seats, metal chairs scattered across the open space, and a makeshift bar at the back, the thick scent of alcohol flowing softly through the room.

When she rises to her feet, her head held high, everyone near her takes off,  _ scrambling  _ to get away before she can gut them. A few go for the weapons scattered around the room - metal pipes and knives and guns, whatever they can get their hands on quickly. The rest bolt for the doors, fleeing like startled deer from the site of a hunt even though they outnumber the wolves a hundred to one.

She hears Wyatt behind her, sees his claws as they catch on the bannister and haul him up next to her. His attention snaps to the fleeing crowds, to the men and women advancing from the back, their make-shift weaponry clutched tight in their fists. When his eyes turn to her, there’s a question held inside them, clearer than any emotion she’s seen from him in the last two days. 

“No,” she says and bunches her fist in the back of his shirt, stopping him before he can bound away. She looks around, eyes spinning around the room wildly - and then, like a prayer answered from above, she spots a shaft of sunlight, a half-open door swinging open and closed as people rush through it.

_ Freedom. _

“This way!” she snaps and all but runs towards it, dragging him with her as fast as she can. He stumbles and staggers along beside her, hisses and whimpers escaping him, and her heart aches, but she doesn’t stop; she can’t stop, can’t give him a moment of rest. Their freedom is  _ right there _ , just beyond those doors, and Monroe’s men are-

Wyatt yelps and jumps sideways, crashing into her, and she realises with a start that one of the men is climbing over the seats to get to them, a metal pipe swinging in wild arcs in his hand. She ducks under the pipe as it comes back around, feels the shift of the air as it sails over her head - and then realises that she’s lost her grip on Wyatt. That he’s not here beside her, that he’s-

She straightens, eyes searching, heart pounding, but she doesn’t have to look far. He’s in the next row of seats, his claws ripping at the man’s throat.

She can’t explain the feeling that explodes inside of her when she sees him, claws wild and tearing. So unlike the brother she knew, all kind smiles and helping hands and knowing smirks, so unlike the beta he was meant to be, the brother he always was. Something inside of her breaks at the blood that splatters across his shirt, his fangs wide and snapping and searching for flesh. She doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the sight.

“Wyatt!” she gasps and grabs him by the arm, ripping him off of the lifeless man. His skin is hot beneath her touch, like he’s running a fever, and slick with sweat and grime; she tries not to think about it, to notice the wounds that crisscross his skin, the exhaustion that drags at his feet as she redirects him towards the door. There’s nothing she can do about it. Not until they are out, not until they are free.

She only has a grip on him for a few seconds, and then he is gone again, twisting out of her hands quicker than she can tighten her grip and leaping towards their other opponents, the rest of the hunters brave enough to stand against them. 

She almost forgets to keep moving, she’s so busy watching him; it seems so effortless, the way he leaps from hunter to hunter, slashing and maiming and killing, unaware or uncaring of the blows they rain down on him. The metal bars thud against his skin, loud enough for her to hear. She tries to keep up, but it’s impossible; every time she thinks to help him, the hunter is already dead and Wyatt is a step ahead, more victims than she can count left in his wake.

Someone gets too close to her, their pipe catching her arm. Pain tears across her skin but she pays it no mind as she growls and wraps her claws around the pipe, throwing it aside. Her attention leaves Wyatt for barely ten seconds, as she pushes the man against the wall and leaves shredded skin where his neck should be, but when she turns, she’s met by the sight of Monroe standing tall, his lips pulled into a smirk. As he lifts his arm and the barrel of his magnum turns to face her. 

She meets his eyes, wicked and cruel.

The bullet isn’t far behind. 

She braces herself for the impact, for the sound of silver tearing through her skin, burning as it enters her heart or her leg or her arm, but instead there’s nothing. 

Wyatt  _ howls _ .

Her head snaps to where he stands, barely five feet away from her, to the red blossoming from the bullet hole in his stomach. All her breath leaves her and everything around her ceases to exist. All she can see is the wound, and the blood coating what remains of his tattered shirt. His face screws up in pain, his eyes filled with confusion. 

He tries to take a step, toward her, or away from her, she doesn’t know, but his knees buckle from beneath him, sending him tumbling to the ground. As soon as he hits the ground, unmoving, the world around her rushes back, noise filling her ears, anger consuming everything else. She hears Monroe laugh, a chilling sound that she couldn’t hate more, and then the cock of his gun as he readies another silver bullet, aiming for her heart.

“It’s always a shame when mutts have to be put down, don’t you think?” he taunts her, his finger settling on the trigger. “All that time wasted, and he wasn’t even worth the money.” 

He fires, but she’s faster, filled with rage and drawing from a moonstone filled with power - power she’s missed, but hasn’t forgotten how to use. Her claws wrap around Monroe’s hand and twist, the magnum tumbling from his fingers as something  _ snaps _ and shatters. 

He cries out, but none of the hunters remain in the room, leaving him helpless. No longer is he a god like he thinks he might be; instead, he is nothing more than a myth like the ones whispered to pups under a full moon. He falls to his knees when she drops his hand, cradling it like a baby would his bottle and looking up at her with narrowed, burning eyes. He’s nothing without power, nothing at all, and Willa can’t help but enjoy it as she takes a step toward him, the older man scrambling backwards and spewing insults. 

She follows him, quicker than he can escape, and when he falls over himself in his haste, she lunges. Her claws are at his neck, pushing,  _ squeezing _ , and he’s choking, blunt fingernails dragging uselessly across her hand. 

She shoves him into the floor, growling, her moonstone shining bright blue, a true Alpha with her prey trapped beneath her, trapped like she had been for months, with nowhere to go. 

She bares her teeth and her claws draw blood.  _ End this, end of all of this by ending him- _

She hears a whimper from behind her, snapping her from the bloodlust that courses through her veins.  _ Wyatt.  _ Wyatt. She has to - she has to help Wyatt. She has to get him out of here, get him to help, get out, get out,  _ get out _ . 

Her hold on Monroe’s neck slackens, and then releases, leaving him doubled over and gasping for breath as she turns towards where her brother lies motionless on the floor, inches from the door - from  _ freedom. _

She crouches beside him and rolls him over as carefully as she can. He’s awake but unresponsive, and when she says his name, once, twice, three times with no answer, she knows she has no other choice.  _ It’s all for his own good _ , she reminds herself over and over, her fingers shaking as she lifts her hand.  _ I have to save him. _

“Wake  _ up _ !” she snaps and slaps him hard across the face. He stirs and his eyes flicker open, glazed over and only half-aware of his surroundings. It’s good enough for her, as she rises to her feet, half-pulling, half-lifting him onto his own.

“Hold this,” she says, and presses his hand to the wound on his stomach, hard enough that he cries out in pain. “ _ Hold _ it,” she repeats, cold, heartless, and when she removes her own hand he keeps the pressure on, however pale the effort of it makes him.

There’s a laugh behind her as she grabs his other arm, so tight her fingers dig into his skin. She pauses in her flight to glance back, to meet Monroe’s eyes and the slow smirk that spreads across his face from where he sits between the seats.

“We’re not so different, you and me,” he says, when he sees he has her attention. “Maybe I should start calling  _ myself  _ the Alpha.”

“You will never be an Alpha,” she snarls. “And we are  _ nothing _ alike.” She turns away, pulls Wyatt towards the door, intent on escaping, on leaving this place before it’s too late and his men come back and-

“Are you sure?” he calls after her. “I may not be the most honest man in the world...but even I wouldn’t treat my brother like  _ that _ .”

_ Climb! _

_ Wake up! _

_ Hold it! _

Pain. Confusion. Misunderstanding.

No. She’s not Monroe. She won’t let him get into her head like that, won’t let his words follow her out the door and all the way back home, where they will seep into her skin like poison. She is not like him. She’s only doing what she has to to get her brother home, where he can live and heal and be her Beta again, the only person she would ever want to lead a pack with. 

She has to get him  _ home _ . 

She can’t leave him here, lost as the monster they created. She couldn’t ever leave her brother if it came down to it, if it was her life versus his, her capture versus his. No matter what, she will always fight with him, fall with him, do whatever it takes to save him over herself.

“Fuck you,” she seethes, and tugs Wyatt through the doorway, towards freedom. 

Towards  _ home. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please remember to leave a comment!


	4. hold me tightly (break my bones)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now, finally, we get to the fun part.
> 
> thanks to everyone that has stuck around even though this has taken us months just to put out half of xD and thankyou to all the people that left comments recently, they really got our asses back into gear to finish this thing.

It’s a long run across open ground, bullets flying around them, from the hunter’s base to the forest that surrounds it. Willa doesn’t look back, doesn’t stop to take in the lonely cluster of buildings that lie above ground, the assortment of trucks and vans parked around it. Even as the bullets start to fall short and the shouts fade to distant noise, she doesn’t stop or relax her grip on Wyatt, not until she’s so deep in the woods it almost feels like she’s back in the wild again, climbing down into the valley behind the den, nestled between the tallest of the mountain peaks.

It’s only once she slows to a walk, her heart hammering in her chest and her breath rising like fog in the cold morning air that she feels truly free. Free to move, free to breathe and run and hunt, to wander down and play in the nearest creek like a pup or sing a gathering song as she walks - Wynter’s favourite activity.

She doesn’t do any of that. Instead, she stops and listens for the sounds of the hunters chasing them, trying to judge how far away they are, how long they can rest before they must start running again. It won’t be very long.

She needs to put distance between them and the hunters. She knows they’re going to come after them, knows that Monroe won’t go down without a fight, won’t stop until he’s dead or she is, unwilling to let a wolf escape and take his best fighter with her. First comes the distance and then comes finding shelter, and after that-

She grips her brother’s arm tight enough to hurt.

“Come on,” she tells him, attempting to keep her voice kinder, softer, thinking maybe it will work out here in the wide open, that maybe he won’t feel as empty once he smells the pine he used to pick at and the moss he likes to lift up and throw at her, urging her to _live a little Willa, no one lives their whole life so serious!_

He doesn’t react. He doesn’t magically turn back into who he was, doesn’t smile or laugh or smirk. Instead he growls softly at her and attempts to pull his arm out of her grip, his other hand still pressed to his aching wound.

She blinks back tears as the truth hits her, out in the forest where they used to chase and tease and tag. “Come on,” she says a second time, her voice harsher, her words stronger. He doesn’t move, not even when she tugs at his arm, willing him forwards. “We need to go.” She lets go of him and shoves him forwards ahead of her, deeper into the forest. “Go!”

He flinches away from her, fear echoing like thunder in the depths of his empty eyes, and takes two stumbling steps on his own before collapsing against a tree, breathing hard and curling around the bullet in his stomach.

 _Fuck_ , she thinks as she realises she’s pushed him one step too far. Somewhere in the distance, a shout rattles the trees; a hunter’s voice, searching for their trail.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she spits into the dirt for good measure, and then she grabs Wyatt by the collar and drags him towards the scent of running water nearby.

She finds herself on the banks of a waterway small enough for her to leap over, threading its way merrily through the very bottom of the valley. She can’t hear the hunters over the sound of its gentle current - they are at the top of the valley, as far as she can tell, downwind and lost for direction currently. They won’t take long to find the trail she’d left, with all the crashing through the woods Wyatt has been doing, but it will buy her a minute to take care of him and make sure he won’t die in the chase that will follow.

“Sit,” she tells him, unnecessarily - as soon as she lets go of him, he falls over, groaning as he clutches at his stomach. She crouches next to him, avoids his bloody claws as they swing at her face, and then pins his arm to the ground so that she can pry the other one off his stomach just long enough to look at the deep, bloody puncture below it. As soon as she releases him he scrambles away, almost falling into the water in his haste.

She goes a little upstream to wash his blood from her hands, mentally listing the things she needs to seal a wound like that enough to keep him walking. She can use the water to clean it, can sit him in the stream and let the current do the work...and then she needs to pack it before it can get infected, and seal it with something to stop it from bleeding…

 _Pine sap_ , she thinks as she looks at the trees around them, the dry needles that cover the ground. She goes to the nearest likely tree and crouches at its base, her back to Wyatt as she scratches and stabs at it with her claws, digging through under the inner bark to get at the veins of the tree.

She doesn’t bother looking back at him as she hunts for something to catch the sap with, ending up with a large lotus leaf from the stream, even though she can hear him moving around, trying to lift himself off the ground enough to attack her. It’s obvious, listening to him, how much it hurts him to do so. Her heart aches at the sound, at his blind struggle to protect himself. She grabs it before it can break, and stows it somewhere where she cannot feel it, where it cannot cause her harm.

When she’s done with the tree, she turns back to the stream and hunts through the plants growing up and down its banks. There’s not much to choose from; all she finds is avens and loosestrife and a small cluster of water reeds, swaying gently in the current. A handful of flowers is far from her ideal choice to treat a bullet wound, a bit of sap far from the best seal, but she doesn’t have time to go hunting through the whole valley, so she takes what she can find and piles them neatly in a patch of soft grass for later.

Wyatt whimpers as soon as her eyes land on him, a small, pathetic noise that she would usually tease him mercilessly about. Her lips stay pressed together as she corners him this time, the silence deafening.

He is getting weaker. It’s barely a fight to grab him this time, to drag him into the stream. Once she has him sat on the rocky bottom of the waterway he gives up, sitting still and lifeless as she tugs his filthy shirt over his head and does her best to scrub it clean against her knee with the handful of reeds she’d gathered earlier.

 _Maybe it feels better_ , she tells herself as she watches him, as the water pulls blood and dirt and god-knows-what from the ugly bullet wound, as it scrubs the dirt from his skin. It’s certainly a relief to her, even fully clothed - she pauses from her work on his shirt to lean down and scrub at her face, splashing water across her dry and dirty skin. She wishes she could bathe properly, could take a brush and scrub at her skin until not a trace of that place remains - but if she listens closely, she can hear the hunters descending into the valley, and she still has to treat his wound.

She works quickly, using Wyatt’s shirt to scrub the dirt from his upper body and squeeze water through the deep lacerations on his shoulder and the puffy and infected cut on his cheek, so crusted and inflamed she’s almost afraid to touch it. _Next time_ , she tells herself, stomach churning, and rinses his shirt one last time before lifting him out of the water and back onto the bank to dry.

“No,” she snaps when he tries to press his hand against the bullet wound again and slaps at his fingers. “Let it drain.” It’s almost worse when he doesn’t snap back, when he just sits there and bleeds, either far too trusting or without the will to care anymore. She turns away to get the sap and tries not to think too hard about it.

Somewhere behind them, a distant yell echoes through the trees, her ears sharp enough to pick up the thud of the footsteps that go with it. Her heart leaps into her throat, adrenaline sending her flying back to Wyatt’s side with the precious little sap she’d been able to collect in her makeshift bowl. _They’ll catch you again_ , a little voice whispers as she crushes her herbs, and mixes her poultice. _They’ll put you back in that cage. They’ll put Wyatt in that ring and make you order him to die._

 _Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt._ She shoves him to the ground, pins him down as she pokes her makeshift plug into the wound, as she forces as much of the sticky sap to adhere to his skin as she can. He writhes underneath her weight as she tends to it, every touch a fresh pain, but she doesn’t notice. Her thoughts are full of silver cages and metal bars and the emptiness of his eyes as he’d stared at her across the ring.

“Don’t touch it,” she tells him as she lets him up. She shoves his shirt over his head and leaves him to figure out his arms as she shuffles around the clearing, kicking pine needles over the blood congealed in the dirt, throwing the remnants of her medicines into the stream. The hunters are getting closer; their scent reaches her now, pungent with silver and tobacco and something rotten, like a kill left out too long in the sun.

“Come on,” she says and drags Wyatt up onto his feet. “In the water.” She puts him in front of her, makes him step into the shallow water and turns him so that he is wading upstream.

“Go!” she orders when he hesitates, like he is confused. His movements are stiff and mechanical as he obeys, his limbs tense with fear, and even she can’t stymie the wave of guilt that washes over her.

She can’t stop though. She can’t let him meander along at his own pace, however much she’d like to. She has to drive him forward, and then again five minutes later, and then again and again and again, even when his knee threatens to give out from underneath him, even when they climb out of the stream far, far upstream and find themselves barely a day from the silhouettes of their mountains, their home.

She pushes him on through the setting of the sun, through the night, and not once does she let him falter or fall, no matter what it costs.

## X

At the eve of their second day of walking, even shoving and snapping won’t make Wyatt move anymore. He is dead on his feet, head hanging, steps shuffling, clutching at his stomach again like it hurts. Willa is frustrated with him, that he keeps trying to stop, but she is exhausted and shaking too - the only thing still moving her forward is fear, cold and hard, and the knowledge that if the hunters catch up to them, neither of them will be able to put up a fight.

Wyatt stops in front of her, so suddenly that she almost runs into him. She prods him forwards again, her fingers digging into the small of his back, and he turns to snap at her, eyes yellow and teeth flashing. She stares at him as the power of his moonstone fades from his eyes and his lips press back together in that same, pained expression he’s been wearing for days. She still can’t see anything of the Wyatt she knows in that face.

“Fine,” she says loudly, letting her voice fill up the air. “Fine, you want to stay here? You want to sleep out in the open? You do that then.”

She waits for a reaction, for him to growl at her, or attack her, or lie down and wait to die like he’s wanted to for the past twenty four hours...but nothing happens. He just stands there and stares at her blankly, his body trembling from exhaustion, his eyes cloudy and his hand pressed to a wound she probably needs to redress.

Willa huffs a sigh, turns on her heel, and storms off through the trees as fast as her aching legs can carry her, wanting nothing but to pretend for a minute that he is not here, that she is alone in this mess and he is safe at home in the den.

She weaves around several trees and pushes between two tall, widespread bushes, and finds herself abruptly at the end of her path. A wall of rock stands before her, small enough that if she had the energy to climb it, she could easily do so, but she is exhausted and this physical wall is the last thing she can deal with.

She stares at it for several seconds, like her tired eyes can’t quite believe it is there, and then she slumps to the ground and puts her head in her hands and shoves a deep breath into her lungs like it will make everything better, like it doesn’t send sharp pains cracking through her ribs.

When she lets the breath out, it brings with it a sob, and even she doesn’t have the strength to bottle up the tears as they drip between her fingers, falling faster than she can blink them away.

It doesn’t make sense to her anymore. The sun is going down, and the hunters are still on their tail no matter how hard she tries to lose them, and her brother is alive, but he is dead. Is there anything left of him there anymore? She’s not even sure he recognised her in the ring - he only stopped because she acted like she was a hunter, and he’s only stayed with her because she’s continued to do the same, to be no better than them...and it _kills_ her inside to think about it, to let her fear drain away and the memories of all the times she has forced him onwards take its place…

There’s a loud rustling and a heavy, slow step as something pushes through the bushes, and then a shadow falls across her. Fear shoots through her at the shadow, at the man silhouetted by the fading sun, lips pulled back in a snarl, and she scrambles to her feet, her mind screaming _Monroe_...but it is only Wyatt, crouched defensively as she rises much too fast for his liking. Gritting her teeth in annoyance, she scrubs at her eyes and steps back to give him some space.

“What are you doing here?” she snaps, and she almost tells him to _go away_ , but the lost, empty look in his eyes as he flinches away from her catches the words in her throat. The anger drains from her limbs, just as quickly as it had arrived, and she slumps, defeated and frustrated with herself for having ever wanted him to leave, when she’s spent so much effort saving him.

This is a good place to sleep for the night, at least, the rocks at their back, and the bushes to hide them from view, even if the ground isn’t very soft. “Lie down,” she tells Wyatt, gentle this time - and then remembers, as he stands and stares at her, that he doesn’t understand gentle anymore. “Lie _down_ ,” she says again, her voice rising, her teeth snapping together. This time, he obeys and sinks to the ground.

She doesn’t watch him curl up in the dirt, doesn’t watch him turn his eyes back to her, empty and unseeing, watching only for any sign of threat. It doesn’t make sense to her, the back-and-forth he’s always doing between attacking her and being afraid of her, the constant cycle of having to beat him into the ground every few hours to remind him that he is not allowed to kill her. She’s not sure it makes sense to him either; there’s something wrong in his head, something illogical and unreachable, and she hasn’t got the first clue how to set it right.

She turns instead to the forest, forcing her tired feet forwards again to find another pine tree to tap, and to fashion a strip of bark into something that will collect the sap for her overnight. In the morning, she’ll fix Wyatt’s wound again. She’ll find them something to eat, she’ll follow the scent of willows and algae to the water source that must be nearby, and then she’ll turn them east, towards the den, towards the long walk home.

When she returns to Wyatt and the hollow they’ve chosen to hide in, his eyes are closed and his limbs are slack, his breath shallow but even as he sleeps. She lays herself down on the other side of the clearing, shivering even as her moonstone lights up to warm her against the night’s cold. A fire would be nice, would warm her right down to her bones...but she’s already lying down, her eyes already drifting shut, desperate for sleep…

## X

The sound of a gun firing and someone running through the forest jerks her awake.

Her eyes blink open, staring up at a black sky with very few stars. It is still night, only a few hours past when she’d lain down to rest. Not long enough for anyone to have picked up their trail and followed them all the way out here to the foot of the mountains, and yet-

“Just leave it, Woody!” a voice hisses, close enough for her to hear. “It’s not like we won’t be able to find that one later. We’re supposed to be making sure the other one isn’t here…”

There’s another voice, too quiet for her to hear, but she’s not listening anyway, her mind buzzing with questions. _How_ were they here? How had they found them so quickly? The last time she had scented the hunters was a full day ago and she’d headed straight into the wildest country she could find from there, far from anything remotely known to humans. She’d been so careful to cover her tracks, to leave no trace behind them, she’d tried over and over to disappear, and yet…

She shifts slowly and silently, crawling towards the shelter of the bushes and wriggling into a dip in the earth where something else has already burrowed a hole to hide in under its branches. A second later, a man steps through the trees to her right and into the hollow they’d slept in for the night, his eyes taking in the empty clearing, the stone wall and the scuff marks left on the ground from where they’d slept.

“She’s not here,” he calls back to his friend on the other side of the trees. Willa hardly dares to breathe.

Laughter replies, ringing, off the rocks and filling up the heavy air of the night. “Told you he’d kill her,” a familiar voice says, closer than ever now. Woody, the one that stopped worse from happening to her in that place, the one that brought her to her brother and laughed when she asked to go in. The one who thought this all a game, caring more about the bets he placed than the people trapped in cages around him. Though, that’s all any of them cared about, she knows; how big the wad of money could grow in their pocket, rather than the lives they destroyed in search of entertainment.

“He didn’t kill her,” the man in the clearing scoffs, turning to look at Woody through the trees. “We’ve been everywhere that he’s been, we would have found her body if he had. More likely he just ran off without her, or she left him for dead. She’ll be halfway back to New Hampshire by now.”

“So…” Woody shifts and finally she spots him through the trees, scratching at his head. “What’re we gonna tell the boss?”

“We’re gonna tell him she got away. _But_ we’re going to save that news for when we find the other one.”

“Ah,” Woody sighs, like it all makes sense now. “Blackmail. Got it.”

“ _No_.” The man in the clearing huffs and then climbs back through the trees, disappearing from sight. “A _peace offering_ so that he doesn’t take our heads off, idiot. Give me the tracker.”

They walk away, their voices fading into the forest, and slowly, Willa crawls out from under the bushes, her eyes searching her surroundings. Wyatt is gone, like she’d thought; she can see his footprints leading out of the clearing, can smell the copper of spilt blood and the sweet scent of pine sap. She hopes the blood is from a wound he already had and not something new. She’s not sure how much more he can take.

The smell of iron and silver lingers still in the air, leading her to a tree with a bullet lodged deep in its bark. She can smell the gunpowder too, and the tobacco that sits in one of the men’s pockets. Wyatt’s tracks lead past the tree with the bullet, panicked and running headlong into the forest, heading the same way the hunters are.

 _The hunters_.

They are easy to track; their footsteps are light on the dry forest floor, barely disturbing the dust and needles that coat it, but the stench of the silver that they carry on them sticks to the trees and hangs in the air like a bad smell. She follows with her nose wrinkled, crouched like she’s hunting a deer at home, her moonstone tucked under her shirt where it won’t attract attention.

It feels good to be moving like this again, even if her body aches and her joints crack and she’s not slept half as much as she needs to. She feels alive again, more like a wolf than she has in weeks. The sudden desire to be home grabs her like a hand around her throat; she wants to be in the den again, wants to stalk prey in woods she knows like the back of her hand, wants to run and jump and hunt the way she always used to.

It’s almost suffocating, the desperation that stabs at her stomach at the thought of it, the longing for home when she’s so far away. She stops, takes a deep breath, and shoves it away. There will be time to miss home later. First, she needs to find out how these hunters are following them, and get rid of them.

The more she thinks about it, the deeper in her lungs their foul scent goes, the hotter the anger stirs in her gut. She’s sick of this game, sick of being chased and chased no matter how far into wolf territory she disappears. It makes her blood boil, that they had come so close to her (it sends fear shooting through her too, wringing her stomach and clutching at her lungs, but she blocks it out, focuses on the fury instead).

It can’t go on - home is a long way away, and she can’t drag Wyatt all that way at the pace she’s been setting so far. It will kill him just as fast as the hunters would if they got their hands on him.

She finds the two hunters standing in the midst of a jumble of rocks, their heads bent over a small electronic device as they argue with each other over which way they should go. She climbs, swift and silent, up the nearest rock and crouches on top, peering down at them.

Like a stone dropped from a height, she leaps from the rock and slams Woody to the ground, the device skittering from his hand and across the rocks.

Chaos erupts. The other man yells, leaping away and scrambling to pull out his gun. Willa follows him, lunging for his hands as he backpedals, trying to escape her. Her claws rake across his fingers, splitting open tender flesh and he screams, an ungodly sound that reminds her more of a wounded animal than a human. Wild-eyed, frightened, clutching at his fingers, he stares at her. And then he charges straight at her, like his body weight will be enough to stop her.

Her moonstone flares at her neck, bright brilliant blue shining through her thin shirt as its power floods her veins. With a snarl, she shoves him backwards. He flies into one of the stones with a loud _crack_ and crumples to the ground, unconscious.

“Stop!”

She turns slowly, teeth bared and eyes a piercing, furious gold, and glares at Woody, his gun trembling in his hands.

“Put it down, _human_ ,” she snarls; she can smell his fear, can see every tremor that shivers down his spine. He is far from the bravest or the strongest of the hunters. He is no match for her, an Alpha. _The_ Alpha.

“Don’t move!” he says and scrambles to his feet, his aim wavering as he does so. She lets him stand. “You move, mutt, and I’ll shoot you!”

“You call me a _mutt_ one more time,” she replies, taking a step towards him. “And I’ll gut you and spread you across the rocks for the foxes to enjoy.”

“I saved you!” he says, like he’s trying to barter, like he’s realised the only one with any power here is her - and he _knows_ it, deep down, she’s sure, he just doesn’t want to believe it. “I was kind to you! I took you to the other one, you remember? You owe me!”

“I owe you nothing,” she spits and shows him her teeth, sharp and deadly. “The only thing you’ve ever done for me is try to save me for yourself. And now you come out here, hunting me, hunting my brother...and you think I will lay down and come quietly just because of your silver bullets? Because you were kind for five seconds of your life?” She laughs, loud and mocking, devoid of any humour.

She takes another step.

He shoots.

The bullet whistles past her, slamming into the stone somewhere behind her. It takes everything in her and all the strength of her moonstone to stop herself from flinching.

Woody drops the gun, his hands shaking, his eyes wide with fear. He backs away, tries to turn and run...but she is faster, a hand wrapped around his throat, her elbow slamming his shoulder against the stone she’d jumped from, pinning him there.

“How are you following us?” she demands, loud enough that he cringes away from her, his eyes squeezed shut.

“T-the-the tracker,” he tells her and points to the black box he’d been holding earlier. “There’s a-a chip in the o-o-other wolf’s neck.”

“ _Wyatt_ ,” she snaps at him, a growl rippling in the back of her throat. “His _name_ is Wyatt. We have names, hunter, and lives, and families, and everything else you humans think we don’t.”

“I know! I know!” Woody bursts out, the blood draining from his face. “I-I never wanted to be a werewolf hunter, I...I’m just a guy who owes Monroe a lot of money. I-If I’d known this was his side hustle I never would have-”

“Shut _up_ ,” Willa snaps, tired of listening and unable to understand half of the things he’s saying anyway. His mouth snaps shut obediently. She resists the urge to roll her eyes.

“Where’s Monroe?” she asks instead, renewing the pressure on his neck. He yelps and coughs and almost reaches up to claw at her hand with his own, before thinking better of it, his fingers twitching in the space between them.

“He’s u-up the valley with - with the others,” he tells her before she can cut off his airway completely. “Coming from the o-o-other direction to corner the other - to corner _Wyatt_.”

Her heart leaps and her hand slackens again as fear strikes at her core, icy cold and sharp as a knife. If they get to Wyatt before she does-

“W-will you let me go?” Woody asks, almost hopeful. “I’ll be n-nice to the wolves, I’ll t-try to help them, just let me - please, I have kids, I have family, I promised I’d be…” His babbling turns to background noise as she leans down to pick up a large rock, weighing it in her hand. “Please - no - my family - you said you have family too! What about your family?”

She raises the stone and then pauses as the words register with her. “Yes!” he says and his shoulders slump in relief. “Your parents - what if your parents went away and never came back, what if they needed help and-”

“My parents are dead,” she snarls over the top of his rambling, and then she smashes the stone into his head and lets him fall with a nasty _crunch_.

 _Your brother is dead too,_ the rock says as she drops it, not bothering to check if Woody is alive or dead. She rushes over to the tracker, presses at the buttons randomly until it turns on, and then squints at the lines and dots on the screen. None of it makes sense to her, other than that the pulsing red dot is Wyatt, sitting stationary in the forest somewhere. She tucks it in her pocket and retraces her steps to the trail he had left when he bolted, following as swiftly as she can.

The land rises around her as she travels, following Wyatt’s trail into a narrow gully pressed up against the foot of the mountain. It ends in a dead-end of smooth stone and sharp cliff, too high to climb with a bullet in his stomach and his shoulder half ripped apart. The trees here are shallow-rooted, small and shrubby, used to being washed away in the winter rains and melting snow, and small caves and depressions honeycomb the rocky walls of the gully, hidden in the night by the deep shadow of the mountain.

She thinks for a second that the hunters aren’t here, that they’d started too far up the valley, or that Wyatt had missed them by heading into this narrow crevice under the mountain. There’s no way they could be coming down from the other end of the gully - the cliffs are far too challenging for humans, and it would make no sense to climb down here when the rest of the valley goes on far into the distance, a hundred ways to travel.

She almost, _almost_ thinks it’s safe...and then a single, long whistle drifts through the trees.

Willa freezes, her claws pressed to the smooth bark of a birch tree as she listens. _Ahead_ , she thinks, and her blood runs cold - but if they are whistling, then they are still moving, and if they are still moving, they haven’t found Wyatt yet.

She has a feeling she’ll know when they find him. It won’t be quiet, and it won’t be easy, not with the way he fights like a rabid animal, and not with the lack of finesse that Monroe’s men possess.

She angles in the direction of the whistle, and she turns into a ghost, as comfortable amidst the rocks and trees as she’s ever been.

The first man is easy to find. It’s easier again to slit his throat; he doesn’t hear her even when she’s right behind him, doesn’t make a sound until the strangled cry of surprise that escapes his mouth as she grabs him, muffled by her hand. Her claws rip through his jugular in the next second, and she shoves him away before he can cover her in blood.

For a second, she watches him bleed out on the forest floor. There’s a certain kind of satisfaction to giving them what they deserve, when they’ve given the same fate to countless of her kind.

From her left, a whistle splits the air, high and sharp. She steps over the body, her old prey forgotten, her new target found.

It’s not Monroe that whistles, just another nameless man, tall and filthy, sucking on a cigarette even as he stalks through the forest on the trail of a werewolf. He’s got a tracker in one hand and a gun in the other. Willa goes for the gun first, burning her hand on its silver barrel as she shoves it towards the rocks to redirect the bullet he fires as she appears, his trigger finger itchy.

She rips it from his grasp and throws it away - and then snarls loudly as he tries to grab her with his now-free hand and turns back to finish the job, snapping his neck with one quick draw of strength from her moonstone.

“Travis?” Monroe’s voice calls in the silence, summoned by the sound of the gun firing, a whistle gone unanswered. Silence follows the call, and the next one, his voice tinged with annoyance.

Willa moves slowly through the trees towards the sound of his voice, blood dripping from her claws and footsteps just a whisper against the ground. “Travis! Denton!” he calls again; she can hear his anger rising, his frustration with the loyalty of dead men.

Angry, daring, she lifts her head and howls at the hidden moon and the heavy clouds overhead.

Monroe falls silent.

She creeps towards the last place she’d heard him, sticking to the deepest shadows that lie under the trees and the rocks, careful where she steps as she goes. It’s like hunting a rabbit; she has to be slow and silent, has to hide every flicker of movement, or it will bound away before she can grab it by the neck.

This was always Wyatt’s forte, she thinks with a pang of sorrow. The slow stalking, the patience to wait for his prey to lure themselves into the trap. She’d never learned past chasing them down, too impatient to sit and wait when there were far larger animals that could be caught with quick action and brute strength.

The urge to rush Monroe is tempting, but she resists. If she underestimates him, she dies, and if she dies, Wyatt goes back to that ring. And if Wyatt goes back…

 _No._ He won't. It isn’t worth thinking about.

She can hear Monroe as she gains ground on him, muttering into a radio and listening intently to the static that replies. He’s standing between two trees and staring into a jumble of rocks at the end of the gully as he talks, a gun held loosely at his side.

She crouches, hidden by a rise in the earth, and watches, trying to figure her way around the gun.

The static replies, but he doesn’t lift the radio to his ear like before, doesn’t listen to the message. Instead, he raises his head and scans the forest around him, looking for something.

“I know you’re here, Alpha,” he says, and smiles into the darkness to her right. “And I know you killed my men. You’ll pay for that later.”

Willa has several things to say, mocking or otherwise, but that is his game, by talking to the silent trees. She bites her tongue, and waits. Monroe chuckles to himself before lifting the radio to his lips and muttering something in reply, his eyes shifting between every bush, tree and suspicious looking rock around him, waiting for her to move.

Willa wants to attack him, to throw him to the ground and tear his heart out, just so that she’s sure she’ll never have to look him in the eye again. Maybe if she can be sure he is dead, she’ll be able to throw him from the nightmares that plague her too, the constant fear that she’ll turn around and be back in that ring, his laugh echoing all around her...

The voice from the radio comes crashing through the bundle of brush to her right, his boots loud and heavy as he emerges with a silver automatic clutched tightly in his fingers, his radio hanging loosely from his hip. _Vince_ , Willa recognises him as the moonlight illuminates his wrinkled, snarling face, and feels sick to her stomach. The man Woody had ‘saved’ her from, another face that haunted her, in waking moments and at rest.

“Any news?” Monroe asks him, hooking his own radio to one of his belt loops.

Vince shakes his head, gesturing towards the gully. “Dave and Rodney are gaining on him, but nobody’s spotted him yet.” He gives a quick glance around, noticing the absence of his two late night poker buddies. His sight lands back on Monroe, “Where are - “

“Dead,” the older man supplies, looking annoyed. “I’m investing in real hunters after we bring these two back in chains. Fucking worthless, all of them.”

Monroe spits at the ground, and Willa’s nostrils fill with the heavy scent of chewing tobacco. Vince’s lips twist into a sneer, and his finger moves to the trigger of his gun as he begins walking, leaves and roots crunching under his muddy boots. “Fucking bitch,” he seethes, loud enough for the other man to hear. “If Woody would have let me do what I wanted to do to her, they wouldn’t have escaped in the first place.”

“It’s too late for that now,” Monroe mutters, moving further away, investigating off to the left. “You can have your turn with her once we find her. Start searching. She’s close.”

They lapse into silence, Monroe disappearing through some thick foliage, Vince poking and pushing aside branches with the barrel of his gun. Willa can hear him cursing and mumbling as he advances close to where she’s hiding, but she can still hear Monroe off in the distance, still close enough that he’d hear a scuffle, and Vince is nearly on top of her, inching closer and closer, so if she doesn’t move _now_ \- 

Silently, she leaps.

Vince turns just a fraction slower than she moves, the barrel of his gun slamming against her upper arm, but she’s numb to the pain. Looking at him eye to eye, nothing holding her back...standing tall, just as he is, evenly matched...the anger that courses through her is unrelenting. She’s stronger than him, better than him, _more_ than him. She’s an _Alpha_ , and he’s nothing but a pathetic little human who wouldn’t last a second against a werewolf that wasn’t bound or tamed.

The gun tumbles out of his grip faster than he can hold onto it, lost to the tangle of roots and plants beneath their feet. She has him by the neck a moment later, his shocked eyes locking onto hers. She holds him there, one hand around his neck, the other covering his mouth so he cannot make a sound.

He gapes uselessly, his words trapped in his throat like she’d been trapped when he’d left her cheek a mess of blistered red and bloody skin, when he’d taken away her title and everything she’d ever made of herself with one cruel action and replaced it with a scar too ugly to ever bear a mark again.

She’d hated the fear that had shivered down her spine then, and she hates the feeling of its cold fingers squeezing at her chest now. She never thought anything could make her feel like that, until she’d found herself in that place, with these men.

She promises herself no, she’s never going to feel like that again.

“You should have finished me when you had the chance,” she hisses. His mouth moves against her palm, but she doesn’t let him speak. Instead, she throws him to the ground, knocking all the breath from his lungs, and pins him down with her own weight.

He doesn’t make a sound as her claws slash through his neck like tissue paper, tearing and ripping and shredding, and she doesn’t stand until she’s sure there’s nothing left of him. When it’s finished, she stands, chest heaving, and stares at what she has done, trying to find any part of her that feels remorse for killing so mercilessly.

(It isn’t there.)

A bullet flashes past her face, close enough that she feels the sting of its passing against her cheek. She flinches, and then whips around to face the foe she already knows it will be, muscles tensed in preparation to fight or flee.

“Had your fun, Alpha?” Manroe asks. He stands between two trees, feet planted and gun gripped tight, a vicious smile cutting his lips. Fury burns in his eyes and the lines of his body, his tongue sharp where it hides behind his blunt teeth. “There’s a lot of people who miss you, back home.”

“Fuck you,” she spits, though she shouldn’t say anything at all. He fires at her again, and her moonstone flares to life, shifting her feet faster than even her own reflexes can keep up with.

“There’ll be no bargaining or special treats this time either,” he continues, the barrel of the gun following her. “I’ll be sure to beat you just as hard as I do your brother, this time. Maybe then we’ll finally get to see which of you is the better fighter.”

“You won’t be seeing anything but your own grave,” she replies angrily, inching slowly closer as she circles around him.

He laughs, edging away from her, eager to keep his distance. There is no humour in the sound, only malice and some kind of righteous fury. “So intimidating,” he says sarcastically, openly mocking her. “I’ve faced far worse beasts than you in my time, darling. I’ve seen far worse than your weak, worthless brother too - _hell_ , if the rest of your pack are anything like you two, I’m not sure if it’s even worth all this effort to find them.”

He stops moving, gun dropping a little as his expression changes to something much darker. She circles closer, holding her breath in fear that he will suddenly realise his defenses have dropped.

“I think I still will find them though,” he tells her, speaking slowly so that she cannot mishear him. “Just so that I can watch you watch them die, one by one. And then I might even show you what I can do to your brother too, don’t you think?”

“You’re never going to touch my brother again,” Willa growls, and then she leaps forwards, teeth and claws bared. Her fingers catch at his flesh, claws gouging his skin from shoulder to stomach. He cries out in pain, the gun firing wildly; she wrestles it from his grip and turns it against him, the burn of the silver against her fingers only a tickle compared to the sweet taste of the satisfaction as he freezes, the gun pressed hard against his stomach.

“Pathetic,” she spits in his face, and watches as anger and fear chase each other around his eyes and the twist of his mouth, his mind carefully calculating his next move.

“You’re wasting your time, trying to get him back,” he says eventually, eyes searching her face for something. Mercy, maybe, or uncertainty. He won’t find any of either. “It would be a mercy to leave him with me. He’ll never live as a wild thing like you again.”

“He’ll forget about you eventually,” she replies, an edge to her voice.

Monroe snorts. “After everything we’ve done to him? You don’t know what you’re talking about, Alpha. We’ve beaten him, and starved him, and drugged him to kingdom come, and we’ve filled his head with so many new ideas that you’ll never be able to _empty_ it.”

His lips curve upwards, as if forgetting for a minute that he is trying to convince her to let him live. “The wolf he was before is long gone, Alpha. You might as well leave him where he’s comfortable, instead of forcing him to go along on this futile quest to turn him back into something he will never be again.”

He stares at her, like he’s expecting her to agree with him, to put the gun down and run away home and leave Wyatt to his fate. She sneers at the very thought of it, her lips drawn back to show him sharp teeth.

“I’ll take my chances,” she tells him firmly, pressing the gun further into his gut when he opens his mouth to speak again. “Even if I don’t get him back again, at least I’ll know that you’re dead.”

“Wait-” he starts to say, but too late; without another moment of hesitation, she unloads the remainder of his magazine into his stomach, enough silver to ensure he won’t fill his belly with anything else ever again. He slides from her grip and slumps to the ground, his heart pouring the blood from his veins too fast for anyone to hope to save him.

She doesn’t wait for him to die, tossing the gun and rubbing gingerly at her scorched fingers as he writhes at her feet, small, pathetic noises struggling from his lips. She leaves him there to face his fate, confident that there will be no reviving him. She doesn’t need to stand with him as he dies.

She needs to find Wyatt. She needs to go home.

She turns for the jumble of rocks that mark the end of the valley, the place the hunters had been closing in on, the only place Wyatt could be. The moment she turns her back on Monroe, weaving her way through the dark shadows of the trees, she resolves to put him out of her mind and to never think of him again.

It is deathly silent without the noise of the hunters shifting through the forest; and it is only because of the silence that she hears his whimpering and his loud, laboured breath ahead of her. “ _Wyatt_ ,” she says, too afraid to call for him too loudly and springs across the rocks.

He’s crumpled at the very end of the gully, cornered on three sides by the cliffs. He tries to rise as she approaches, struggling to push himself up onto his feet, but he takes one step towards her and his knee gives out from beneath him, sending him crashing back to the rocks.

Willa stops, thinking that maybe if she stops moving, he will stop killing himself trying to fight her, but to no avail; he rises again and again, and loses his balance every time. “Wyatt,” she says after the third attempt, kind and cajoling, and takes a step forward. He doesn’t react to his name, but he flinches at the movement, falling backwards and swiping at empty air with his claws.

Her frustration from the day before returns, fuelled by the thought of more hunters coming up the valley, of the tracker in Wyatt’s neck leading them straight here. “Let me _help_ you,” she snaps and grits her teeth, following him as he scrambles backwards across the rocks, afraid.

What does it look like to him, to see her towering over him, tall and angry and soaked in blood? What kind of terror does he feel, when he fights back so feebly that she pins him to the ground in a matter of seconds? She shouldn’t think about it, shouldn’t entertain the guilt that swamps her when she does what she _has_ to do to keep him alive, but the thoughts creep in anyway, undaunted.

 _He’ll_ _forgive you when it’s over_ , she tells herself, feeling along the back of his neck for the lump under his skin that indicates the tracker is there. _When he comes back, when he is better, it will make sense._

She doesn’t know if she believes herself.

She finds the tracker pressed up against his spine, a tiny thing the size of a pill shoved under his skin. It’s a tricky spot, she muses, one finger pressed against it, her claw almost digging into his skin. And then she remembers the moonstones, remembers what she’s seen them do to other human inventions they’ve come into contact with. _One kindness_ , she thinks, and pulls his moonstone around to the back of his beck, presses it firmly to the little pill of metal in his skin.

He flinches, like he’s been shocked. She puts his moonstone back where it belongs and reaches around to pull Woody’s tracker out of her back pocket. Its strange map of lines and dots is empty, a warning sign flashing _connection lost_ at her over the top. She gives it a grim smile and tosses it to the side, hauling Wyatt to his feet.

“ _Stop_ it,” she snaps as he wobbles and tries to rip himself from her grasp, throwing all his weight against her like an errant child. He is scarily weak - she huffs a sigh and loops one of his arms over her shoulders, all but carrying him out of the rocks.

“We just have to get out of here, Wyatt,” she mumbles to him as they limp their way out of the gully, circling around the dead hunters so that he doesn’t have to see them. “We’ll go back to our camp, I’ll fix you up, and we’ll find somewhere safe to sleep. It’ll be alright. They won’t find us now.”

He doesn’t respond, doesn’t even try to tug away from her. He just limps on, one foot in front of the other. _It’s okay_ , she reassures herself, taking his weight as he hops on his swollen, stiff knee. He’s just in pain, just exhausted still from running and running, weak and delirious from whatever Monroe had been giving him in that place. In a few days, he will be better. In a few days, things will turn around.

In a week, they will be home, and she’ll be able to look after him properly, and the pack will be able to bring him back to life. Her heart aches at the prospect, at the thought of seeing him smile again, seeing him move freely the way he used to, with grace and precision. That will be a good day.

For now, they walk, heads down, dreaming of better days (or maybe dreaming of nothing at all).

## X

Two days on, it starts to rain.

It’s not a big storm, no lightning crashing in the dark night sky or thunder rumbling through the mountains, just a constant, steady drizzle of rain that soaks them through and turns the ground beneath their feet to mud, slippery and hard to walk through.

Willa pushes on as far as she can, but even she starts to tire quickly, sick of the constant rain and the feeling of water dripping down her back, her hair drenched and sticking to her head. Wyatt is dead on his feet, limping along ahead of her with no care for where they’re going or if they will ever stop (he’s walking on his own now, at least, after a couple of days of slow travel and plenty of rest).

She stops him at the first cave she sees; a shallow depression in the rocky wall of a mountain’s foot, barely tall enough to stand in, its entrance slick with running water but its inside dry and sheltered from the wind. She lays Wyatt down at the back of the cave, where she will be the first to see any hunters that might appear in the woods around them ( _they won’t they won't they won't;_ but she just can’t push the fear from her mind).

He stares at her with uncomprehending eyes as she takes a seat on the cool ground beside him, eyeing the poorly-done wrap over his stomach; straps of what was left of his shirt and some of hers tied together around a wound that probably needs more treatment than just tree sap and crushed leaves.

She sighs when it doesn’t look like he’s going to move on his own, scooting slowly towards him, trying her best not to react when he flinches at her closeness, at her knees brushing against his swollen one.

“Sleep,” she tells him softly, sliding her hand over the dry rock towards the cavern’s wall. “Lay down and sleep, Wyatt.”

He doesn’t move; doesn’t understand, like he can’t move without being ordered to or breathe without being told to inhale and exhale. It pains her, seeing him like this, having to re-teach him how to eat and sleep and move without being told to do so, without fear of a whip slashing across his back or a metal bar slamming into his gut.

A fresh wave of guilt washes over her at the reminder of all the things he’s been subjected to since they parted ways, the things she’d been too late to save him from. It’s not her fault, she knows, but Monroe’s voice echoes in her head - _beaten, starved, drugged to kingdom come_ \- and his eyes fix on her, fearful, or furious, or completely blank, and she can’t help but feel like she has failed him in some spectacular and unforgivable way. That even if she can restore his mind, he will never look at her with fondness again.

“You need to rest, little brother,” she whispers, though she feels like the sentiment is more or less useless. Would he ever look at her the same again? Would he ever trust her or hug her or love her?

His eyes turn to her, blank and uncomprehending. “ _Sleep_ ,” she says again, reaching out and pushing at his shoulder, pushing and pushing until he’s laying on his back, staring up at the cave’s misangled ceiling.

It sits wrong with her; Wyatt sleeps on his side, not his back. But she bites her tongue and pushes back the memories and lays down beside him, turning so that she’s on her side, facing his motionless body.

Her mind wanders back to when they were little, to her long-gone father pulling her aside one moonless night and asking her to watch over her brother. She’d been angry at Wyatt for something, furious enough that even the older members of the pack were avoiding her, let alone the other pups. He’d done something stupid and reckless and they’d both gotten into trouble even though she’d had nothing to do with it...and then her father had found her sulking in a corner, and sat down beside her.

 _No matter what he does,_ he’d said, the words still clear as a bell in her memory even if everything else is hazy and almost-forgotten. _No matter how much you think you hate him, or you wish that you weren’t his sister, you must be there for him. You have to look after each other._

Willa had promised, eventually, that she would honor his wishes. And she’d followed through over the years, again and again and again, always two steps ahead so that she could spot the trouble before it came.

Now, lying here in a cave far from home, watching the bruises that mar Wyatt’s skin grow darker and darker, she wonders if she has even been enough, or if she was always destined to let him down.

Sleep finds her slowly, her mind far too busy to rest even as her body cries for it. She dreams of home, of her parents and of being a pup again with Wyatt bright-eyed by her side, bolting through the den’s maze of tunnels and into the forest beyond. Her dreams are bright and happy - restless, always running from something even with all her family gathered around - but happy none-the-less.

For some reason, one particularly happy memory pushes its way to the forefront of her mind.

She sees Wyatt smiling by the fire, enthralled by another bedtime story she couldn’t remember the origins of. She sees the crinkle of her father’s eyebrows as he throws his arms up to imitate a scary monster, startling her brother into her mother’s side. She hears her mother’s soft laugh as she wraps her arms tight around him, Willa sitting at her feet, her eyes rolling when her father shoots her a wink.

 _That’s not even true_ , she remembers telling him, her father sharing a knowing look with her mother.

 _Oh really?_ He had asked her, challenging her even as her brother stayed hidden behind her mother’s furs.

 _Really_ , she had deadpanned, meeting his curious eyes with her own.

_And how do you know it’s not true, pup?_

_Because you would never fight such a terrifying monster alone._ He had looked at her for a long moment then, his lips slipping into a firm smile, almost like he knew something she didn’t, which happened far more than young Willa had liked to admit.

_Sometimes the biggest battles are the ones we have to face alone._

The memory begins to fade after that, her father slowly rising from his seat and raising his arms to chase little Wyatt around the room. Her brother had squeaked and ran, and her mother had pressed a hand to her daughter’s shoulder, her fingers squeezing warm skin.

Her mother had held her tight, as Willa had turned her father’s words over and over again in her head, wondering and pondering and forever curious.

The words are sombering, remembering them now, with someone who is barely even a shell of her brother sleeping not even five feet from her.

She tries not to linger on the long battle she knows still lies ahead, of pack traditions and meetings and her little sister-

Instead she dreams.

Her dreams after the memory are just as happy as the rest.

## X

Her reality is not.

She wakes up as soon as his hands wrap around her neck, one and then the other, squeezing as tight as he can. Her eyes flash yellow, a growl caught in her throat by the strength of his grip on her neck. Her claws scrape at his hands, her moonstone shining like a trapped star at the nape of her neck.

It can’t end like this. They can’t escape from Monroe, from all the horrors of that place, to end up like this. Her heart aches, her voice strangled, unable to call out to him, her hands useless.

There’s only one way out, she realises somewhere between panicked thoughts of death, of _this is where it ends, this is what all of it was for_. Her moonstone is scorching hot around her neck, its power thrumming through her veins, begging for her to act upon it. She doesn’t want to do it, to fight against him again - but panic wrests control, and adrenaline rushes through her at the sheer feeling of _strength_ that she’s been so long deprived of, and she cannot die here, after everything-

Drawing at the power of her moonstone, she twists against his grip and wraps her hands around his arms, throwing him towards the wall of the cave. He slams into it with a loud _thump_ as she falls to her hands and knees, gasping for breath.

He struggles to stand, fast off the ground in the face of perceived danger, but she’s faster, launching herself across the cave to pin him to the wall before he can her. “Snap _out_ of it,” she growls, her voice sharp. His eyes snap to hers, wide and confused and deeply, deeply afraid. “I’m the Alpha,” she tells him firmly. “You listen to _me_.”

The fight drains out of him. Willa holds onto him until she’s sure he won’t attack her again and then shoves him to the side and slumps onto the ground, more irritated than she is angry.

“God _damn_ it, Wyatt,” she mutters to no one in particular, leaving him where he lands. He doesn’t move, too afraid to, his back pressed against the stone and his eyes following her as she climbs to her feet, one hand holding her neck, the other fidgeting at her side. She stays as long as she can stand his wary eyes watching her, and then abruptly, she turns and steps outside, leaving her brother alone in the cave.

It’s early, the sun high and shining for the first time since the rain had set in. The air is muggy and thick. She stands there and takes in the sunlight until she’s not able to take in anymore, until she’s hot and sweat is beading at her brow. It doesn’t have the effect she was hoping for; she had just wanted to feel alive for a minute, to pretend that this was another day outside the den hunting. She scrubs at her eyes when she feels tears welling quietly in their corners, and breathes out slowly, willing herself to calm down.

She can do this. She can get him home. They are so close now, the hunters gone for good, Monroe nothing more than a ghost whispering in her ear. Ghosts can’t harm them any more than a leaf falling from a tree could; Monroe is powerless, except to plant doubt in her mind in her moments of weakness. Once she gets Wyatt home, she’ll never have to fear his words again - once she gets him home, everything else won’t seem so insurmountable.

She just has to get him there.

She rubs at her neck again, at the faint marks of his fingers that are already starting to bruise. He’s getting stronger, at least; in two days alone, the sad, beaten tilt of his shoulders has disappeared, the pain in his eyes has decreased. He travels longer and he takes shorter rests, and when she leaves him sat against a tree or something while she looks for something to eat, he gets up and finds something to occupy him, instead of staring listlessly into some middle distance until she returns (he runs too, every now and then, but at least he _can_ run).

It’s good, this new strength, the life returning to his eyes...but if he’s going to keep attacking her...she shivers at the memory of his hands wrapping around her throat, at the emptiness in his eyes as he’d tried to choke the life out of her without even realising what he was doing. It can’t go on like this; she can’t even _sleep_ without him trying to get the better of her, can’t leave him for more than ten minutes without him trying to escape from her grasp.

She stays outside until she has an idea, and then she ducks back inside the cave. She finds Wyatt exactly where she had left him, pressed into the back corner of the shelter. His eyes flash with fear when she enters, and Willa wonders how often he will look at her like that in the coming weeks (months, years).

“Stop it,” she grumbles at him for the hundredth time since they fled into the mountains and crouches beside him, slapping his hand away before he can even think to reach for her (she wants to believe that he’d reach out to hug her, to squeeze her hand like he used to when he knew she was afraid of something, but the ache in her neck is a constant reminder that he only reaches out to hurt her, that she has to do something about it or continue to fight him for the rest of her life).

She doesn’t say anything else to him, doesn’t let herself think too hard about it and swallows the guilt that tries to throttle her as she reaches out and rips the moonstone from around his neck, shoving it into her pocket, safe, out of reach. The light dies slowly from his eyes as its power fades from his veins, a low growl stuttering in his throat as he curls away from her, afraid, as human as a wolf can get.

She doesn’t think about it. She thinks about home instead, about the journey, his wounds, the logistics of getting them from here to there in one piece. “Come on,” she says to him and wraps a hand around his arm, pulling him out of the cave and, blinking, into the light of the sun. “We’re going _home_.”

**Author's Note:**

> please remember to leave a comment to let us know you were here; nothing makes us write faster than feedback ;)


End file.
